Nir Shafir Holy Land

Nir Shafir IN AN OTTOMAN HOLY
LAND: THE HAJJ AND

THE ROAD FROM
DAMASCUS, 1500–1800
This is the story of a holy land in the Middle East—but not the one you might
expect. Cities like Jerusalem and Mecca might quickly come to mind, but Da-
mascus was the key to the creation of an Ottoman holy land between the six-
teenth and eighteenth centuries, because Damascus was the gateway to the
hajj. As a recent flurry of museum exhibits reminds us, the hajj—that is,
the pilgrimage to Mecca and Medina—has been a well-established part of
Muslim religiosity for centuries.1 The Ottoman dynasty also celebrated the
hajj’s importance over the six centuries of its rule, even if no sultan personally
undertook the journey.2 Yet the hajj’s aura of timeless sanctity also hinders
I would like to thank Tijana Krstić and the anonymous reviewers for their comments on this
article. In addition, the participants of the University of California Mediterranean Studies Work-
shop in 2015 provided valuable feedback on a very early draft of this article. Mina Moraitou of
the Benaki Museum of Islamic Art provided very helpful information about items in the muse-
um’s collection and kindly supplied photographs of the objects. All translations are my own
unless noted otherwise. The open-access status of this article has been funded by the European
Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation
programme (grant agreement no. 648498-OTTOCONFESSION).
1
See, e.g., Venetia Porter, ed., Hajj: Journey to the Heart of Islam (London: British Museum,
2012).
2
On the Ottoman administration of the hajj, see Suraiya Faroqhi, Pilgrims and Sultans: The
Hajj under the Ottomans, 1517–1683 (London: I. B. Tauris, 1994). Sultan Osman II (r. 1618–
22) apparently made plans to undertake the hajj in 1622. Contemporary observers, however,
understood this desire as a pretext to raise a new army in Anatolia to counter his standing army,
which opposed his grander ambitions of rule. His hajj was not realized as he was overthrown
and killed shortly thereafter. See Gabriel Piterberg, An Ottoman Tragedy: History and Histori-
ography at Play (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), 23–25.
© 2020 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-
NonCommercial 4.0 International License (CC BY-NC 4.0), which permits non-commercial reuse of the work with attribution.
For commercial use, contact journalpermissions@press.uchicago.edu.
2 In an Ottoman Holy Land
scholars from understanding its historicity. How did the hajj complement and
compete with other forms of Muslim religiosity, such as saint worship/Sufism?
Can we speak of an “Ottoman” hajj, and what significance did this pilgrimage
carry for the many non-Muslim subjects of the empire? Approaching the hajj
from the shrines of Damascus, no longer so holy today, rather than Mecca and
Jerusalem’s hallowed sites, allows us to scratch away a bit of the gilding of en-
during holiness and find a history of choices and contingencies, controversies
and contestations.3
I argue in this article that between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries an
Ottoman holy land emerged that comprised the traditional sanctuaries of
Mecca, Medina, and Jerusalem, as well as the lands of greater Syria. Follow-
ing the conquest of the Arab lands in the early sixteenth century, the Ottoman
dynasty turned Damascus into both the center of an Ottoman imperial cult
around the grave of the medieval theosophist Ibn ʿArabī and the empire’s pri-
mary logistical hub for the hajj in response to the challenges of its religious
and political competitors. As tens of thousands of Rūmī—that is, Turkish-
speaking—pilgrims used the new infrastructure to stream into and through
Damascus, the hajj also became an extended pilgrimage to visit the numerous
tombs of Syria, Palestine, and Egypt. Non-Muslims too began to use the same
infrastructure to partake in their own pilgrimage to Jerusalem and its envi-
rons, which they also referred to as the hajj. These overlapping claims to
the hajj brought Rūmīs, Arabs, Christians, and others into competition and
collaboration over the significance of the Ottoman holy land.
As the logistical hub for the hajj, Damascus offers a view onto how reli-
gion was shaped by the forms of mobility available at the time, especially
due to the development of material infrastructure. I take inspiration from
recent scholarship, specifically that on the hajj, that has emphasized how new
technologies of travel, such as steam and jet power, transformed Muslim reli-
giosity by expanding its geographical horizons in the nineteenth and twentieth
centuries.4 These works, with their focus on modern technologies, refrain from
commenting on the premodern period, yet their insights can be applied to early
modern forms of mobility. An unexpected complement to these studies is the
recent book by James Grehan on everyday religion in greater Syria during the
3
One source of inspiration for this article is Alexandra Walsham, The Reformation of the
Landscape: Religion, Identity, and Memory in Early Modern Britain and Ireland (Oxford: Ox-
ford University Press, 2011).
4
Nile Green, “Spacetime and the Muslim Journey West: Industrial Communications in the
Making of the ‘Muslim World,’ ” American Historical Review 118, no. 2 (Apr. 2013): 401–
29, and “The Hajj as Its Own Undoing: Infrastructure and Integration on the Muslim Journey
to Mecca,” Past & Present 226 (2015): 193–226; Eric Tagliacozzo, The Longest Journey:
Southeast Asians and the Pilgrimage to Mecca (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013); Eileen
Kane, Russian Hajj: Empire and the Pilgrimage to Mecca (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University
Press, 2015).
History of Religions 3
early modern period. He argues that an “agrarian religion” centered on saint

worship flourished in rural parts of the Middle East among both Muslim and
Christian communities. Although not explicitly framed as such, Grehan’s argu-
ment is about mobility and materiality. According to Grehan, a shared reli-
gious practice of saint worship emerged from the timeless patterns of rural life
and the inability of the “high” Islam of scholars and jurists to move into the
countryside. Only the technological and infrastructural transformations of the
nineteenth and twentieth centuries delivered the shocks needed to dismantle
the material conditions underpinning saint worship, bring the high tradition
of legalistic Islam to all areas, and make Muslim and Christian peasants realize
that they belonged to distinct religious traditions.5 Grehan deserves credit for
pushing scholars to pay attention to the difference between urban and rural re-
ligious life in the early modern Middle East. However, we should not assume,
as Grehan does, that increased circulation inevitably homogenizes devotional
practice and obliterates saint worship.6 As Nile Green has demonstrated, mod-
ern technologies like steamships and steam-powered printing presses actually
fed a florescence of religious practices centered on saintly miracles.7 More-
over, I disagree with Grehan’s presumption that premodern Ottoman society,
even in rural areas, was static and immobile. People (and objects) traveled on
camels, horses, and on foot rather than on steamships and trains, but the em-
pire was always on the move, and these movements redefined its religious
landscape. While the mode in which people traveled remained largely the same,
there were particular circuits and forms of mobility unique to the Ottoman Em-
pire; the road from Damascus was one of these.
The second part of this article’s argument is that the regime of circulation
built on the road from Damascus gave rise to a specifically “Ottoman” lived
religion in general and a shared culture of pilgrimage in particular. The hajj
became a central component of the lived religion of many of the Ottoman Em-
pire’s inhabitants, Muslim and non-Muslim. Christian subjects of the empire,
for example, came to refer to their pilgrimage to Jerusalem as the hajj, even
integrating the honorific hajji—that is, someone who completed the hajj—
into their names and titles. Asking how the hajj became “Ottoman,” in turn,
5
James Grehan, Twilight of the Saints: Everyday Religion in Ottoman Syria and Palestine
(New York: Oxford University Press, 2014). Legalistic Islam could emerge in nonurban, even
nomadic, contexts, as the maḥaẓra tradition of northwest Africa reminds us. See Mohamed
Lahbib Nouhi, “The Maḥaẓra Educational System,” in The Writings of Mauritania and the
Western Sahara, ed. Charles C. Stewart (Leiden: Brill, 2016), 18–48.
6
On nonhomogenized landscapes of globalization, see Frederick Cooper, “What Is the Con-
cept of Globalization Good For? An African Historian’s Perspective,” African Affairs, no. 100
(2001): 189–213; James Ferguson, “Seeing Like an Oil Company: Space, Security, and Global
Capital in Neoliberal Africa,” American Anthropologist 107, no. 3 (September 2005): 377–82.
7
Nile Green, Bombay Islam: The Religious Economy of the Western Indian Ocean, 1840–
1915 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011).
opens a number of related questions for the study of religion. How did the
Ottoman hajj differ from earlier iterations, given that the ritual itself did
not change? What is the role of the state in the creation of common religious
practices? And how does the religious practice of one community—in this
case, the Muslim practice of pilgrimage—come to be a shared aspect of the
lived religion of a diverse and multiconfessional early modern empire?
To speak of an “Ottoman” hajj also requires probing the analytical valence
of the word “Ottoman.” In its most restricted sense, the word applies only to
the actions of the ruling dynasty, the eponymous house of Osman. In the early
modern period, the word was used largely in this limited sense, both by the
dynasty itself and its observers. Modern historians, however, employ a more
expansive definition of “Ottoman,” in which the word is a blanket term that
applies to anything and everything that occurred within the empire’s bound-
aries. Moreover, many implicitly extend this idea conceptually and assume
that every subject within the empire’s boundaries also possessed a shared
“Ottoman” mentality or culture, which in turn drove their political and intel-
lectual choices.8 The mechanisms for the dissemination of a common Otto-
man culture or mentality are rarely articulated, however. Most often, histori-
ans point to the actions of the state as creating an Ottoman culture. For
example, the sociologist Karen Barkey argues that the Ottoman state inten-
tionally promoted a policy of religious tolerance, one that broke from earlier
and supposedly narrower iterations of Islam.9 Even if we accept Barkey’s as-
sertions of a state policy of ecumenicalism, they do not necessarily help ex-
plain how cultural practices like the hajj came to be shared by all the empire’s
subjects at the community or individual level. Like many premodern empires,
the Ottoman government did not attempt to homogenize its diverse popula-
tion under a single imagined culture. While the state actively intervened in
the daily religious practices of Muslims and the institutional structure of Is-
lamic law, it never contemplated the creation of shared “Ottoman” religious
practices among its subjects.10 How then did the hajj become “Ottoman”?
8
See, e.g., Robert Dankoff, An Ottoman Mentality: The World of Evliya Çelebi (Leiden:
Brill, 2006); Gottfried Hagen, “Afterword: Ottoman Understandings of the World in the Sev-
enteenth Century,” in Dankoff, Ottoman Mentality, 215–56; Miri Shefer-Mossensohn, Science
among the Ottomans: The Cultural Creation and Exchange of Knowledge (Austin: University
of Texas Press, 2015).
9
Karen Barkey, “Islam and Toleration: Studying the Ottoman Imperial Model,” International Jour-
nal of Politics, Culture, and Society 19, no. 1 (December 2005): 5–19, and Empire of Difference: The
Ottomans in Comparative Perspective (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 109–53.
10
For recent literature on the intervention of the Ottoman state into Islamic religious life, see
Tijana Krstić, “State and Religion, ‘Sunnitization’ and ‘Confessionalism’ in Süleyman’s Time,”
in Szigetvar 1566—Proceedings of the Commemorative Conference on the Siege of Szigetvar
and Suleyman the Magnificent’s and Miklos Zrinyi’s Death, ed. Pál Fodor (Budapest: Hungar-
ian Academy of Sciences, 2019), 65–91; Nir Shafir, “Moral Revolutions: The Politics of Piety
in the Ottoman Empire Reimagined,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 61, no. 3
To understand how the hajj became a practice that left its mark on nearly
all Ottoman subjects, we have to rethink our understandings of empire. His-
torians today, especially those focusing on the Ottomans, have often under-
stood empire to be a set of institutions that govern by replicating or projecting
the rules and culture of the imperial center onto its provinces.11 In other
words, empire is regarded as a synonym for the state. Other scholars highlight
the inherent social diversity of empires, using empire largely as a foil to the
linguistic, ethnic, or religious homogeneity of the nation-state.12 I treat em-
pire differently in this article. I see empire as a specific assemblage or network
of heterogenous human and nonhuman actors connected in myriad relation-
ships.13 The specific elements of the network, and their arrangement, varied in
time and place. Thus, the “Ottoman” hajj was different from the “Mamluk”
hajj, for example, not because the ritual radically differed but because it
brought together an alternate set of material and social elements: the move-
ment of Rūmī Muslims to the Arab provinces, the kilns of Iznik and Kütahya
that produced the empire’s ceramics, and especially the lines of pilgrim infra-
structure centered in Damascus, among others. The shared “Ottoman” culture
of the hajj was not the intentional construction by the state but an unintentional
(2019): 595–623; Derin Terzioğlu, “How to Conceptualize Ottoman Sunnitization: A Histori-

ographical Discussion,” Turcica 44 (2012–13): 301–38; Abdurrahman Atçıl, Scholars and Sul-
tans in the Early Modern Ottoman Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017);
Guy Burak, The Second Formation of Islamic Law: The Ḥ anafī School in the Early Modern
Ottoman Empire (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015).
11
For earlier work on the Ottomanization of the provinces, especially the Arab provinces, see
Irene A. Bierman, “The Ottomanization of Crete,” in The Ottoman City and Its Parts: Urban
Structure and Social Order, ed. Irene A. Bierman, Rifa’at A. Abou-El-Haj, and Donald Preziosi
(New Rochelle, NY: Aristide D. Caratzas, 1991), 53–76; Jane Hathaway, The Politics of House-
holds in Ottoman Egypt: The Rise of the Qazdağlıs (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1997); Heghnar Watenpaugh, The Image of an Ottoman City: Imperial Architecture and Urban
Experience in Aleppo in the 16th and 17th Centuries (Leiden: Brill, 2004). For usage of empire
as a purposeful framework of analysis, see Barkey, Empire of Difference; Alan Mikhail and
Christine M. Philliou, “The Ottoman Empire and the Imperial Turn,” Comparative Studies in
Society and History 54, no. 4 (October 2012): 721–45.
12
See, e.g., Christine Isom-Verhaaren and Kent F. Schull, eds., Living in the Ottoman Realm:
Empire and Identity, 13th to 20th Centuries (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2016).
13
The argument that causation can emerge from a network of heterogenous elements, both
human and nonhuman, has had many iterations in recent years. Social scientists are drawn to the
idea of a network of human and nonhuman actors because it provides, in the words of the
archeologist Ian Hodder, a way of “embedding materialism within the social, the historical,
and the contingent” without retreating into material determinism. Hodder, Entangled: An Ar-
chaeology of the Relationships between Humans and Things (London: Wiley-Blackwell,
2012), 96. For other examples, see Bruno Latour, Reassembling the Social: An Introduction
to Actor-Network Theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005); Manuel Delanda, Assem-
blage Theory (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2016). For the purposes of this essay,
however, the differences between these approaches are minor.
by-product of the interaction of these elements, a network that could only have
existed with the empire’s expansion and sustained presence.14
This article traces the network that brought about the creation of an Otto-
man hajj and holy land. Damascus functions not as the site of a fine-grained
local study but as a gateway that illuminates the various connections stream-
ing through it. My argument brings together a constellation of actors, both
human and nonhuman, that connect to form a larger picture. Moreover, since
I focus on the transformation of what Nancy Ammerman has termed “lived
religion,” I draw the reader’s attention to the creation of an Ottoman pilgrim-
age culture from everyday practices rather than in theological works.15 The
article jumps from Egypt to Hungary and the many places in-between, but
it begins with the Ottoman Empire’s conquest of Damascus in 1516, which
first provided the Ottoman dynasty the possibility of administering the hajj.
The centrality of the hajj in Ottoman religious life was far from assured, how-
ever, in these initial years. I situate the dynasty’s first operations in Damascus
in a wide array of other forms of state-sponsored Muslim religiosity available
to the dynasty, such as the creation of a set of imperially sponsored saintly
tombs. I then turn to the Ottoman state’s eventual commitment to the hajj and
its massive investment in the physical and textual infrastructure of pilgrimage.
The hajj became progressively important in the daily lives of Rūmī Muslims
from the empire’s heartland, and it even expanded to incorporate visitation
to tombs and shrines. Christians too used the same infrastructure to turn their
pilgrimage to Jerusalem into what they themselves referred to as the hajj. The
last section examines how this network led to a shared Ottoman culture of the
hajj and also to competing claims by Arabs, Rūmīs, and Christians as to who
could define the Ottoman holy land.
HOLY LANDS, OLD AND NEW
Upon his return to Damascus, fresh from the victories against the Mamluks in
1517, Sultan Selim I (r. 1512–20) set out immediately to thank a saint.16 The
sultan seems to have attributed his victory to the omens and intercession of
Ibn ʿArabī (1165–1240)—an Andalusia-born Sufi theorist whom the Ottomans
14
Nükhet Varlık makes a similar argument regarding the construction of a particularly Otto-
man experience of plague. Varlık, Plague and Empire in the Early Modern Mediterranean
World: The Ottoman Experience, 1347–1600 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015).
15
Nancy T. Ammerman, “Finding Religion in Everyday Life,” Sociology of Religion 75, no. 2
(2014): 189–207.
16
For an analysis of the initial years of the Ottoman occupation, see Torsten Wollina, “Sultan
Selim in Damascus: The Ottoman Appropriation of a Mamluk Metropolis (922–924/1516–
1518),” in The Mamluk-Ottoman Transition: Continuity and Change in Egypt and Bilad al-
Sham in the Sixteenth Century, ed. Stephan Conermann and Gül Şen (Bonn: Bonn University
Press, 2017), 221–46.
believed had prophesized the rise of the dynasty in a pseudepigraphic work,

Al-Shajara al-nuʿmāniyya—and thus decided to build an imperial tomb at
the site. Sultan Selim ordered that the residences, bathhouses, and an already
standing mosque in the Ṣāliḥiyya neighborhood be bought from their owners
and quickly demolished. Within three months, a congregational mosque had
been erected around the tomb of Ibn ʿArabī.
Even today, Ibn ʿArabī is a notorious figure. Thanks to his pantheistic the-
ories of the unity of being (waḥdat al-wujūd ), he is regarded as either the
greatest Sufi master or the master of the infidels.17 The residents of Damascus,
however, knew little of Ibn ʿArabī before the Ottomans’ entry. Despite the
fact that it had been well known that he had died in the city, travelers who
sought out his grave state that it was being used as a rubbish dump in the four-
teenth century. In 1499, one apparently had to scale the wall of a bathhouse in
order to access the neglected graveyard housing Ibn ʿArabī’s unvisited tomb.18
Other observers, such as Ibn Ṭ ūlūn (d. 1546), the future imam of the mosque
built at Ibn ʿArabī’s tomb, tell us that the site was already the tomb of a certain
Ibn al-Zakī.19
While they knew little of Ibn ʿArabī, the residents were at the center of their
own holy land, populated by the graves of local saints and holy men, many of
them being ṣaḥāba, the companions of the Prophet. This Syrian holy land had
been built up over centuries; the oldest surviving collection of the faḍā’il
(virtues) of the area comes from the mid-eleventh century and reflects the
traditions and stories that had been collected up to that moment about Syria’s
sacrality.20 The arrival of the Crusaders—who built at least four hundred
chapels and churches in the Levant over the course of their two-hundred-year
presence—prompted the resacralization of greater Syria.21 As the Ayyubids
(under Salāh al-Dīn, r. 1174–93) and the Mamluks (under Baybars, r. 1260–
77) reclaimed this land, they quickly began a campaign of creating a new
Muslim holy land in southern Syria. Rulers, military men, and common
townsfolk took part in rediscovering, often in an inspired dream, the locations
17
I borrow and adapt here Green’s more fitting idiomatic translation of “al-shaykh al-
akbar” and “al-shaykh al-akfar.” Nile Green, Sufism: A Global History (West Sussex: Wiley-
Blackwell, 2012), 79.
18
The traveler was ʿAli b. Maymūn al-Fāsī (d. 1511). ʿAbd al-Ghanī al-Nābulusī, “The Hid-
den Secret concerning the Shrine of Ibn ʿArabī: A Treatise by ʿAbd Al-Ghanī An-Nābulusī,” ed.
P. B. Fenton, Journal of the Muhyiddin Ibn ʿArabi Society 22 (1997): 27–28.
19
Muḥammad b. ʿAli b. Aḥmad al-Ṣāliḥī Ibn Ṭ ūlūn, Mufākahat al-khillān fi ḥawādith al-
zamān [Friendly banter on the events of the times], ed. Khalīl Manṣūr (Beirut: Dar al-Kutub
al-ʿIlmiyah, 1998), 370.
20
Paul Cobb, “Virtual Sacrality: Making Muslim Syria Sacred before the Crusades,” Medi-
eval Encounters 8, no. 1 (2002): 35–55.
21
Stephennie F. Mulder, The Shrines of the ‘Alids in Medieval Syria: Sunnis, Shiʿis and the
Architecture of Coexistence (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2014), 260. Mulder draws
on the work of Denys Pringle for this information.
of the tombs of early Islamic figures and heroes from the wars against the Cru-
saders and then contributing to their construction and upkeep. Older, smaller
pilgrimage sites, such as the tomb of the patriarchs in Hebron, were greatly
expanded, and non-Muslims were banned from entering them. Churches and
monasteries were converted into Sufi lodges; revenues from villages that pre-
viously supported monasteries and churches were seized and reendowed to
support the new shrines.22 Whereas earlier holy sites had predominantly
stressed biblical events and urban locales, this new wave of shrine building
saw the establishment of the graves of a wide variety of early Islamic figures,
learned scholars, and military heroes throughout both the urban and rural land-
scape. Geographies and pilgrimage guides (pilgrimage to shrines, that is) of the
period, like those of al-Idrīsī (d. 1165) and al-Harawī (d. 1215), included these
shrines and sites. While the Crusader incursion might have spurred the renewed
sacralization of the lands of Syria, the spread and establishment of shrines by
themselves was part of the growing shift in the middle to late medieval period
toward an Islam centered on saints and holy men—that is, Sufism.23
The Ottoman government’s warmhearted embrace of Ibn ʿArabī and its in-
tervention in the sacred landscape of Damascus were not acts intended for the
locals but rather for its competitors in Anatolia, the Balkans, and Iran. In the
post-Mongol Turco-Iranian world, especially on the frontiers of Anatolia and
the Balkans, there was a constant potential for holy men and saints’ descen-
dants to raise the flag of rebellion in their fortress-like lodges and become
contenders for political power.24 Only a few years before his conquest of
the Mamluk lands, Sultan Selim had quelled a serious rebellion in central
and eastern Anatolia by the Kızılbaş followers of the Safavid Shah Ismail,
a man who had used his holy ancestry to found a state in the late fifteenth cen-
tury. Even cities like Cairo were not exempt from this particularly Turco-
Iranian idiom of political sainthood. In the chaotic aftermath of the Ottoman
conquest, a new holy man from Anatolia, Ibrāhīm al-Gulshanī (d. 1534),
started gathering a following and consolidating power in Cairo.25 In these un-
certain times, the Ottoman government took a distrustful stance against many
22
Yehoshu’a Frenkel, “Baybars and the Sacred Geography of Bilad al-Sham: A Chapter in
the Islamization of Syria’s Landscape,” Jerusalem Studies in Arabic and Islam 25 (2001): 153–
70; Daniella Talmon-Heller, “Graves, Relics and Sanctuaries: The Evolution of Syrian Sacred
Topography (Eleventh–Thirteenth Centuries),” ARAM 18–19 (2006–7): 601–20; Mulder, Shrines
of the ‘Alids in Medieval Syria.
23
Green, Sufism; Christopher Taylor, In the Vicinity of the Righteous: Ziyāra and the Ven-
eration of Muslim Saints in Late Medieval Egypt (Leiden: Brill, 1998).
24
Zeynep Yürekli, Architecture and Hagiography in the Ottoman Empire: The Politics of
Bektashi Shrines in the Classical Age (Farnham: Ashgate, 2012).
25
Doris Behrens-Abouseif, “The Takiyyat of Ibrahim al-Kulshani in Cairo,” Muqarnas 5
(1992): 43–60; Side Emre, Ibrahim-i Gulshani and the Khalwati-Gulshani Order: Power Bro-
kers in Ottoman Egypt (Leiden: Brill, 2017).
Sufi orders and instead decided to turn Ibn ʿArabī into a “nondenominational
grand master of spirituality from whose esoterism all Sufi orders could get
inspired, and ideologized, in defense of the Sunni faith and its political
patrons.”26
This type of experimentation was found in other early modern Islamicate
empires throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The Mughal em-
peror Akbar (r. 1556–1605) developed a sort of Sufi order in which he was the
holy shaykh and his courtiers and subjects were disciples.27 Later, when the
Mughals conquered the Deccan, they co-opted the shrines of the previous
Muslim sultanates.28 The Safavids built massive tomb complexes in Ardabil
around their dynasts’ graves, in effect creating a cult of the dead around the
shah himself while sidelining other Sufi orders.29 The Ottomans too dabbled
with this strategy throughout the sixteenth century, supporting, for example, a
tomb shrine for Sultan Suleyman on the Hungarian border.30
Contemporary Arab observers, however, saw the Ottoman government’s
sanctification of Ibn ʿArabī’s tomb as an attempt by some poorly educated
Muslims from the north to rival and possibly even replace the hajj and the holy
sanctuaries of Mecca and Medina. The Arabic-speaking residents of Damas-
cus referred to the many Ottoman troops, administrators, and, later, pilgrims as
Rūmīs. In its most basic sense, Rūmī connoted a linguistic and geographic des-
ignation—namely, someone who spoke Turkish and came from the lands of
Rūm (Rome), the central lands of the Ottoman Empire between the Taurus
Mountains in the south and the Balkans in the north. Modern-day readers
may have heard of the medieval poet Rumi (1207–73) from Konya. Rumi’s
English name, however, is actually a contraction of his full name, Jalāl al-
Dīn al-Rūmī, or Jalaladdin from the lands of Rūm. This early modern defini-
tion, though, lies at odds with its meaning in both the medieval and modern
periods. In the medieval period, the ethnonym designated Romans, both the
ancient and Byzantine varieties. Starting in the thirteenth and fourteenth cen-
turies, it began to refer to Turcophone Muslims living in the former Byzantine
26
Hüseyin Yılmaz, Caliphate Redefined: The Mystical Turn in Ottoman Political Thought
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2018), 258.
27
Moin A. Azfar, The Millennial Sovereign: Sacred Kingship and Sainthood in Islam (New
York: Columbia University Press, 2012).
28
Nile Green, Indian Sufism since the Seventeenth Century: Saints, Books, and Empires in
the Muslim Deccan (London: Routledge, 2006), and Making Space: Sufis and Settlers in Early
Modern India (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2012).
29
Kishwar Rizvi, The Safavid Dynastic Shrine: Architecture, Religion and Power in Early
Modern Iran (London: I. B. Tauris, 2011).
30
Nicolas Vatin, “Un türbe sans maître: Note sur la fondation de la destination du türbe de
Soliman-le-Magnifique à Szigetvár,” Turcica 37 (2005): 9–42.
Roman realms.31 This geographic and linguistic distinction was cemented

by the development of Ottoman Turkish in the fifteenth and sixteenth centu-
ries into an urbane and poetic language capable of competing with Persian, a
distinction that separated the Rūmī identity from that of the more nomadic
or tribal Turk.32 In the nineteenth century, however, the meaning shifted again;
it now primarily applied to Greek-speaking subjects of the empire, which is
its current signification. In short, local Arab residents of sixteenth-century
Damascus saw the Rūmīs as foreigners with only a basic grasp of Islam and
its precepts—the rush to build a tomb over the grave of Ibn ʿArabī being the
clearest example of their lack of learning.
In the narration of the events by the aforementioned Ibn Ṭ ūlūn, a number
of bad omens augured poorly for the future of Ibn ʿArabī’s new tomb. On the
day the Rūmīs bought the neighboring buildings, sudden rains caused severe
flooding and mudslides, adding to the general chaos and disturbance that
the Rūmīs had created. The next day, as they demolished the existing mosque,
a deep lake nearby overflowed and flooded the place again.33 Three weeks
afterward, the sultan’s teacher, Ḥ alīm Çelebi, the man who convinced the
sultan to build the mosque and tomb in the first place, passed away.34 Only
a week beforehand, Ḥ alīm Çelebi’s brother, Ḥ asan, had also died.35 Both
were buried at the foot of Ibn ʿArabī’s grave as the Rūmīs devoted their en-
ergy to turning it into a holy site. Shortly thereafter they erected a dome,
a traditional sign of sainthood, over the tomb and dug more graves, but only
under the cover of night, being “afraid of what the people might say and
thinking that no one would find out about it.”36 While the sultan scattered
coins to celebrate the building’s progress and gifted a thousand dirhams for
a poem praising Ibn ʿArabī, the people of Damascus complained of high prices
due to the Rūmīs’ presence and the quartering of soldiers in their houses.37
Similarly, an ominous sign of the Safavid threat appeared one day when an
agent of “Ismail the Kharajite and Sufi” (i.e., the Safavids) was dragged into
31
On the development and history of this identity, see Cemal Kafadar, “A Rome of One’s
Own: Reflections on Cultural Geography and Identity in the Lands of Rum,” Muqarnas: An
Annual on the Visual Culture of the Islamic World 24 (2007): 7–25; Zeynep Aydoğan, “Chang-
ing Perceptions along the Frontiers: The Moving Frontier with Rum in Late Medieval Anatolian
Frontier Narratives,” in Isom-Verhaaren and Schull, Living in the Ottoman Realm, 29–41.
32
Selim S. Kuru, “The Literature of Rum: The Making of a Literary Tradition (1450–1600),”
in The Cambridge History of Turkey, Volume 2: The Ottoman Empire as a World Power, 1453–
1603, ed. Suraiya N. Faroqhi and Kate Fleet (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013),
548–92.
33
Ibn Ṭ ūlūn, Mufākahat al-khillān, 370.
34
35
36
37
the city by his horse, chained to its belly.38 As the shrine neared completion,
they installed pillars taken from a building that a former governor, Janbulāt ̣,
had built, unaware that these pillars had been originally spoliated from the
tomb of some saint named the King of the Garbagemen, (al-malik al-zabbāl),
an unintended allusion to the status of Ibn ʿArabī.39
Sultan Selim and the Rūmī officials accompanying him unveiled the tomb
of Ibn ʿArabī on the Day of Arafat (9 Dhu’l-Hijjah). The Day of Arafat is the
central rite of the hajj, when the pilgrims stream onto the plain of Arafat and
pray for the entire day; missing this rite invalidates a pilgrim’s hajj completely.40
Ibn Ṭ ūlūn suggests that the Ottomans were attempting to replace the hajj with
pilgrimage to the new tomb of Ibn ʿArabī, as they had canceled the northern
pilgrimage caravan to the Kaʿba and refused to defend pilgrims against the
marauding Bedouins.41 Whatever significance or substitution the Rūmīs
might have implied with their choice of day was lost, however, because the
chief judge of the Rūmīs, Zayn al-ʿĀbidīn, was so religiously incompetent
that he could not correctly sight the crescent moon and announce the Day
of Arafat, even with a cloudless sky.42 In other words, he announced the hol-
iday a day early. Regardless, fifty thousand ʿuthmāni coins were distributed to
the populace and chandeliers were lit throughout the major sites of the city.
On the day of the event, 150 sheep and twenty camels were given out in
the celebrations by the sultan. As he distributed the animals, it appeared for
a moment that he had truly built the shrine of a saint. A miraculous pillar
of holy light appeared on the eastern minaret of the mosque: “Some said it
was an angel. Others said it was divine forces at the employ of the sovereign
[hadhā istikhdām maʿ al-khunkār]. Word of it spread among the viziers, the
pashas, and the men of state. Later it was written down that it was the smoke
of one of the nearby bathhouses, which became mixed with some clouds, and
when the sun hit it, they believed it to be holy light.”43 Not only did the pur-
ported miracle fail to impress the locals but also very few of the sheep and
none of the camels distributed to the populace were sacrificed that day, as
residents decided to exercise thrift because of the high prices brought on by
the Ottoman conquest.44
Ibn Ṭ ūlūn experienced a small miracle himself the next day when he was
appointed the prayer leader and preacher of the mosque at Ibn ʿArabī’s tomb.
While he consoled himself with the thought that “God chooses what is best
38
39
40
Porter, Hajj, 48–49.
41
42
43
44
for us,” few of his friends came to visit him in his new quarters.45 The (Arab)
judge of the land refused to visit the tomb when he came to town, preferring
the more traditional tombs at the Small Gate cemetery. He was left with the
Rūmīs, who had made it their custom to visit the tomb during their travels,
and vulgar commoners like a certain ʿUmar al-Iskāf, who came with his
friends to the tomb to pretend to be great Sufis by interpreting one another’s
premonitions (khawātir).46
The examples above should remind us that it was not a foregone conclu-
sion that the Ottoman government would invest both money and legitimacy
into the hajj and the Two Sanctuaries. Throughout the Islamic world, there
were a wide variety of experiments that combined sovereign and saintly power,
and the same impetus motivated the construction of Ibn ʿArabī’s shrine. Yet,
founding a cult centered on Ibn ʿArabī was not so straightforward either. Ibn
Ṭ ūlūn’s suspicious take on Ibn ʿArabī’s tomb reveals the radical uncertainty that
accompanied the religious agenda of the Ottomans immediately following the
conquest. Other Arab scholars of the period voiced a similarly derisive con-
tempt of the Rūmīs’ religious knowledge and opposed the cult of Ibn ʿArabī.47
Both the tomb and the cult faced opposition among Rūmī scholars in Istanbul
as well, and, although Rūmī scholars held a generally favorable opinion of
Ibn ʿArabī, reverence for the saint needed to be enforced among all the schol-
ars in the imperial hierarchy.48 Although the tomb of Ibn ʿArabī remained a
major destination for Rūmī visitors, Damascus and the Arab lands would be-
come the center of a different holy land.
45
Ibn Ṭ ūlūn, Mufākahat al-khillān, 376–77.
46
47
See, e.g., Ibrāhīm al-Ḥ alabī’s rant against the Rūmīs’ Islamic knowledge in Ahamm al-
’umūr, Süleymaniye Kütüphanesi, MS Laleli 2153, fol. 2a. Al-Ḥ alabī was an influential Arab
scholar who restarted a career in Istanbul, although his biographer mentions that this happened
in spite of his criticism of Ibn ʿArabī. Muhammad b. Muhammad al-Ghazzī, Al-Kawākib al-
sā’ira bi-aʿyān al-mi’a al-ʿashira, ed. Khalil al-Mansur (Beirut: Dar al-Kotob al-Ilmiyah,
1997), 2:78. In 1535, a scholar named Muḥammad al-Falūjī was sentenced to death by the judge
of Aleppo for voicing a critique of Ibn ʿArabī. Eric Geoffroy, Le soufisme en Égypte et en Syrie
sous les derniers Mamelouks et les premiers Ottomans: Orientations spirituelles et enjeux
culturels (Damas: Institut français d’études arabes de Damas, 1995), 134.
48
Authoritative legal opinions regarding the tomb were issued by the chief jurists (şeyhülislam)
Ebü’s-suʿūd (d. 1574) and Kemālpaşazāde (d. 1534) and posted on its walls. Şükrü Özen, “Otto-
man ‘Ulamā’ Debating Sufism: Settling the Conflict on Ibn al-ʿArabī’s Legacy by Fatwās, in El
sufismo y las normas del Islam: Trabajos del IV Congreso Internacional de Estudios Juridicos
Islamicos, Derecho y Sufismo, Murcia, 7–10 mayo 2003, ed. Alfonso Carmona (Murcia: Editora
Regional de Murcia, 2006), 309–41; the chief jurist Çivīzāde (d. 1547) was dismissed in part
because of his critical legal opinions on Ibn ʿArabī. Richard Repp, The Müfti of Istanbul: A Study
in the Development of the Ottoman Learned Hierarchy (London: Ithaca, 1986), 252; Cankat
Kaplan, “An Anti-Ibn ʿArabī (d. 1240) Polemicist in Sixteenth-Century Ottoman Istanbul: Ibra-
him al-Halabi (d. 1549) and His Interlocutors” (MA thesis, Central European University, Buda-
pest, 2019).
AN OTTOMAN HAJJ
The Ottoman government ultimately opted for a different vision of a state re-
ligion—one that did not rely on the creation of imperially sanctioned tombs of
holy men and sultans. The tomb of Ibn ʿArabī remained important, but the dy-
nasty chose instead to become a champion of Sunnism and uphold a vision of
Islam centered on following Islamic legal prescriptions.49 Over the course of
the sixteenth century, it invested significant energy and money in construct-
ing Friday congregational mosques in every town and city and ensuring that
Muslims attended them as it tried to propagate a particular notion of religios-
ity based on practices such as canonical prayers, fasting, and the like.50 The
dynasty undertook these actions partially to distinguish itself from its impe-
rial competitors like the Safavids and Mughals, who, as mentioned earlier,
had their own sacral politics of shrines and tombs, but also with an eye toward
the possessions it had at hand. Its greatest asset in promoting a Sunni identity
for the empire lay in its guardianship of the Haramayn, the “Two Sanctuaries”
of Mecca and Medina that it had taken from the Mamluks. Even with these
sites at their disposal, Ottoman interventions in the hajj were a series of ex-
periments for much of the sixteenth century.51 For example, only toward
the end of the sixteenth century did the dynasty decisively abandon support
for the tomb of Sultan Suleyman near Szigetvár in Hungary and order its
shaykh to move to Mecca and focus his spiritual and authorial energies on
the grave of the prophet Abraham, situated right next to the Kaʿba.52
In the eyes of some Arab intellectuals, the government’s shift toward sup-
porting the hajj was a resounding success. In November of 1621, slightly
over a hundred years after the conquest of the Arab lands, the Cairene scholar
Marʿī b. Yūsuf al-Karmī al-Maqdisī (d. 1624) wrote a short book in Arabic,
Necklace of Pure Gold: The Virtues of the House of Osman, explaining why
49
See Tijana Krstić and Derin Terzioğlu, eds., Historicizing Sunni Islam in the Ottoman Em-
pire, c. 1450–c. 1750 (Leiden: Brill, forthcoming); Vefa Erginbaş, ed., Ottoman Sunnism: New
Perspectives (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2019); Tijana Krstić, Contested Conver-
sions to Islam: Narratives of Religious Change in the Early Modern Ottoman Empire (Stanford,
CA: Stanford University Press, 2011); Derin Terzioğlu, “How to Conceptualize Ottoman
Sunnitization: A Historiographical Discussion,” Turcica 44 (2012–13): 301–38.
50
Gülru Necipoğlu, The Age of Sinan: Architectural Culture in the Ottoman Empire (Prince-
ton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005); Zeynep Yürekli, “Writing Down the Feats and Set-
ting Up the Scene: Hagiographers and Architectural Patrons in the Age of Empires,” in Sufism
and Society: Arrangements of the Mystical in the Muslim World, 1200–1800, ed. John J. Curry
and Erik S. Ohlander (London: Routledge, 2012), 94–119.
51
Regarding Ottoman experiments in Mecca, see Guy Burak, “Between Istanbul and Guja-
rat: Descriptions of Mecca in the Sixteenth-Century Indian Ocean,” Muqarnas 34, no. 1 (2017):
287–320.
52
See ʿAlaüddīn ʿAli Dede b. Muṣt ̣afa el-Mostārī el-Bosnevī el-Zigetvārī, Türbe Şeyḫi el-
Ḫ alvetī, Temkīnü’l-maḳām fi’l-mescidi’l-ḥaram, Süleymaniye Kütüphanesi, MS Esad Efendi
3814, fols. 4–32.
the Ottomans were superior to any other dynasty, past or present.53 It proved
popular enough to set off a number of expansions and translations through-
out the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, known by their generic title of
Faḍā’il āl-Rūm (The virtues of the Rūmīs) or the Faḍā’il āl ʿUthmān (The
virtues of the house of Osman). The works had their share of Rūmī readers
too, which made them the site of an incipient public exchange about the na-
ture of imperial rule and legitimacy in the Arab provinces.54
Marʿī b. Yūsuf portrays the Ottoman dynasty as a paragon of both religious
and martial virtue, a surprising view compared to the tepid reception the Ot-
toman troops and governors encountered a century beforehand. Whereas they
had been routinely portrayed as religiously inept brutes, they were now keen
defenders of Islam, especially thanks to their massive investment in the reli-
gious sites of the hajj and the people who lived nearby. Marʿī b. Yūsuf notes
how they spent hundreds of thousands of dinars on the indigent of Mecca,
Medina, Jerusalem, and Hebron, so much so that they were never needy. This
was in addition to the significant expenditures on the military to ensure the
security of the caravan from Bedouin attacks.55 The claim was by no means
an exaggeration; the record books from the seventeenth century demonstrate
that the gifts and payments became increasingly large and elaborate.56 These
imperial donations were supplemented by payments from the gigantic en-
dowment of the Two Sanctuaries, the Vaḳf-ı Ḥ aremeyn, which contained
lands, properties, and monies donated from both ordinary Muslims around
the empire and members of the dynasty itself.57 The government also rebuilt
the walls around Medina and Jerusalem, renewed much of the area around the
Kaʿba, built madrasas and mosques, and covered all the monuments in gold,
silver, and brocade.58
53
The book may have been a failed attempt to rally support for the beleaguered Sultan Os-
man II a few months before his deposition and execution.
54
Şifā’ī, for instance, translates Mārʿī b. Yūsuf ’s book into Turkish and significantly expands
it to support the newly established government of Ahmed III following the 1703 rebellion. After
this translation, the genre largely seems to exist in Turkish for a Rūmī audience. Şifāʿī Şaʿbān b.
Aḥmed, Ḳ alā’idü’l-ʿiḳyān fi feżā’il āl ʿOsmān, Nuruosmaniye Kütüphanesi, MS 3404, and
Österreichische Bibliothek, MS HO 27.
55
Marʿī b. Yūsuf, Qalā’id al-ʿiqyān, Nuruosmaniye Kütüphanesi, MS 609, fol. 45a.
56
Munir Atalar, Osmanlı Devletinde Surre-i Hümayun ve Surre Alayları (Ankara: Diyanet
İşleri Başkanlığı Yayınları, 1991). These notebooks can easily be found in the Başbakanlık
Arşivi.
57
The Vaḳf-ı Ḥ aremeyn also took over the assets of any charitable endowments whose line of
stated beneficiaries ended, a relatively common occurrence. On the endowment, see Mustafa
Güler, Osmanlı Devleti’nde Haremeyn vakıfları, XVI.–XVII. yüzyıllar (Istanbul: TATAV,
2002). For some random examples of documents from it, see Topkapı Sarayı Müzesi Arşivi,
d. 7386, d. 1144.
58
Marʿī b. Yūsuf, Qalā’id al-ʿiqyān, Nuruosmaniye Kütüphanesi, MS 609, fols. 39a–45a.
For a good overview of Ottoman interventions, see Burak, “Between Istanbul and Gujarat.”
The hajj was a colossal campaign, repeated every year, which required
moving tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of pilgrims through hostile and
inhospitable territory.59 A massive infrastructure needed to be developed
to bring pilgrims safely to Mecca and back. Moreover, the pilgrimage cara-
van had to be precisely timed so that everyone would arrive at the appointed
time in Mecca to start the official rites of the hajj; once the caravan left Da-
mascus or Cairo, there was not a minute to spare. Some pilgrims traveled on
camels or horses, and a lucky few were carried in litters. However, the over-
whelming majority, which included the many servants and functionaries that
came along, traveled by foot. The most dangerous stretch was the desert
between Damascus and Medina, where the pilgrim caravans were exposed
to Bedouin attacks.
Although the Syrian route had been used during the Mamluk period, it
contained no forts or formal infrastructure to provide services to pilgrims,
other than the few existing towns.60 Thus, starting in the sixteenth century,
the Ottoman dynasty began a series of large investments in the Syrian hajj
route. The first was a formidable hajj complex built in Damascus by Imperial
Chief Architect Sinān (d. 1588) that included two mosques, a hostel, and a
madrasa. It was followed by a complex of forts to secure the Syrian route
from Bedouin raids, along with water reservoirs and other major facilities
(see fig. 1).61 One should not take this infrastructure for granted. The threat
of Bedouin attack was so immense that it became impossible to travel with-
out both armed escorts and secure locations to shelter at night. Similarly, a
system of payments to the Bedouin tribes was established to limit attacks on
the hajj caravans.62 The system functioned quite well at keeping the pilgrims
safe; Marʿī b. Yūsuf proudly mentions how one of the virtues of the Ottoman
dynasty was their success at pacifying the Bedouin.63
The Cairene hajj route—the most important route under the Mamluks—
was also renovated. When Ḳ ayt al-Dāvudī, one of the official timekeepers
of the hajj, sat down in 1573–74/981 to write a Turkish handbook for pil-
grims (especially for servants and those others walking on foot), it had been
forty years since the previous handbook had been written detailing the Mam-
luk infrastructure. After undertaking the hajj twenty-two times along the Cairo-
Mecca route, he found the landscape fully transformed. So many “mountains
had been parted, water reservoirs [ḳuyūlar] excavated, [and] fortresses built”
59
On this see Faroqhi, Pilgrims and Sultans.
60
Andrew Petersen, The Medieval and Ottoman Hajj Route in Jordan: An Archaeological
and Historical Study (Oxford: Oxbow Books, 2012), 20.
61
Peterson, Medieval and Ottoman Hajj Route in Jordan.
62
Karl Barbir, Ottoman Rule in Damascus, 1708–1758 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University
Press, 1980), 167–78; Faroqhi, Pilgrims and Sultans, 54–73.
63
Marʿī b. Yūsuf, Qalā’id al-ʿiqyān, Nuruosmaniye Kütüphanesi, MS 609, fol. 21a–b.
FIG. 1.—Map showing forts and facilities built on the Syrian hajj route from the
sixteenth to the eighteenth century. Map provided courtesy of Andrew Petersen.
See Andrew Petersen, The Medieval and Ottoman Hajj Route in Jordan: An Archae-
ological and Historical Study (Oxford: Oxbow Books, 2012), 23. Color version
available as an online enhancement.
that previous descriptions of the route had become irrelevant.64 The caravan
was also precisely timed, each minute of rest and travel planned and mea-
sured. Forty minutes (derece) were given for a rest stop at the newly built
Gāh water reservoir followed by a hundred minutes of travel and ten minutes
for the evening prayer.65
As the Ottoman government developed the Syrian and Egyptian hajj
routes, it stopped providing support to other hajj land routes. For instance,
the route from Iraq through al-Ḥ āsā was not maintained and actually closed
to prevent Safavid Shiʿi pilgrims from arriving (Shiʿi pilgrims had to come
through Anatolia before joining the caravan in Damascus).66 The end result
was that Damascus became the major hub of pilgrimage as around sixty
thousand pilgrims, most of them Rūmīs, streamed into the city every year
and stayed there for months as preparations were made.67 (By way of com-
parison, an estimated 10,000–15,000 South Asian pilgrims arrived in Mecca
for the hajj annually in this period.)68
The new physical infrastructure by the Ottoman dynasty was matched by a
concomitant investment in books explaining the hajj and translating them into
high and low Ottoman idiom. At first, texts were collected and bought from
the Arab provinces. For instance, upon conquering Aleppo, the Ottoman
troops inventoried the citadel’s library and sent onward to the palace library
in Istanbul those books they deemed worthy of keeping while auctioning off
the rest.69 Most of the books sent back to the palace were collections of Turk-
ish and Persian poetry, but among them was also a small volume on the prac-
ticalities of managing the hajj caravans and office of the amīr al-hajj.70 More
common were the numerous illustrated copies of the Muḥyī al-Dīn al-Lārī’s
(d. 1526) Persian ode to the holy places and explanation of the rites of the hajj
64
Ḳ ayt al-Dāvudī, Untitled, Maktabat Jāmiʿa al-Malak al-Saʿūd, MS 6783, fols. 2b–3a. As
explained on fols. 8b–9a, ḳuyū means a large water reservoir, not just a well. Other copies
may be found in Süleymaniye Kütüphanesi, MS Esad Efendi 1827, fols. 41–59, and MS
Darülmesnevi 133, fols. 44–63.
65
Ḳ ayt al-Dāvudī, Untitled, Maktabat Jāmiʿa al-Malak al-Saʿūd, MS 6783, fols. 8b–9a.
66
In response, the Safavid government developed new shrines on their own territory.
Petersen, Medieval and Ottoman Hajj Route, 19; Muzaffar Alam and Sanjay Subrahmanyam,
Indo-Persian Travels in the Age of Discoveries, 1400–1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2007), 32–44; Kishwar Rizvi, “Sites of Pilgrimage and the Objects of Devotion,” in Shah
Abbas: The Remaking of Iran, ed. Sheila R. Canby (London: British Museum, 2009), 98–115.
67
It is difficult to estimate the number of pilgrims on the route. These numbers are taken from
Petersen, but see Faroqhi for other numbers regarding animals. Faroqhi, Pilgrims and Sultans,
46; Petersen, Medieval and Ottoman Hajj Route, 34; Michael N. Pearson, Pious Passengers:
The Hajj in Earlier Times (New Delhi: Sterling, 1994), 51–58.
68
Pearson, Pious Passengers, 58.
69
Topkapı Sarayı Müzesi Arşivi, d. 9101.
70
Ibn Aja, Muḥammad b. Maḥmūd al-Qunawī al-Ḥ alabī, ʿUmdat al-nāsik fi’l-manāsik,
Süleymaniye Kütüphanesi, Ayasofya 1333.
titled Futūḥ al-Ḥ aramayn. This text became the basis for late sixteenth-
century and early seventeenth-century Ottoman versified pilgrimage guides
(the genre of the pilgrimage guides was known as manāsik al-hajj [ar.]/
menāsik-i ḥac [tr.]), such as those of Ġubārī (d. 1566) and Baḫtī (fl. 1640s),
the original Persian transformed into eloquent Turkish and its illustrations
redrawn in the Ottoman visual style.71
More important than the illustrated manuscripts or eloquent verses were
the numerous and extremely popular pilgrimage guides written in a more col-
loquial Turkish. Sināneddīn Yūsuf b. Yaʿḳūb (d. 1581), a Ḫ alvetī shaykh and
close confident of the imperial palace who was appointed to the position of
the shaykh of the sanctuary of Mecca, wrote in the 1570s by far the most pop-
ular guide—so popular that it was copied en masse until the early nineteenth
century.72 The book is a rendition into rather conversational Turkish of
two Arabic books that the palace had collected, which suggests at least some
governmental encouragement in its publication and dissemination. It was meant
to be accessible both in language and price. The author exhorts his readers to
spare the five to ten akçe—equivalent to half or whole day’s pay by an un-
skilled laborer in the 1580s73—to have the book copied, lest they spend hun-
dreds of silver and gold pieces undertaking the hajj but fail to complete the
proper rituals that would render it valid under Islamic law. Portable knowledge
of these canonical rituals was the main attraction of these books. ʿAbdülkerīm,
the author of another late sixteenth-century pilgrimage guide and a resident
of a major dervish lodge in Pécs (in modern-day Hungary), reminds his Rūmī
readers that one cannot simply assume that the local Arabs of Mecca and
Medina know the proper Islamic rituals for the hajj. A book was simply
more reliable and his was “heavy in wisdom, light in volume.”74 Moreover,
ʿAbdülkerīm draws a direct correspondence between pilgrimage manuals
and catechisms (ʿilm-i hāls). Both are short, cheap texts aimed at a lay audi-
ence; both attempt to teach Muslims the most legally correct set of actions
71
See, for example, the beautifully illustrated version of Baḫtī, Süleymaniye Kütüphanesi,
MS Aşir Efendi 123, which seems to be primarily a translation of Muhyi’s text. On the illustra-
tions, see Rachel Milstein, “Futuh-i Haramayn: Sixteenth-Century Illustrations of the Hajj
Route,” in Mamluks and Ottomans: Studies in Honour of Michael Winter, ed. David J.
Wasserstein and Ami Ayalon (London: Routledge, 2006), 166–94; Burak, “Between Istanbul
and Gujarat”; for the text of Ġubārī, see Amine Gül, “Abdurrahman Gubârî’nin Hayatı Eserleri
ve Menâsik-i Hac Adlı Eseri (Edisyon Kritik)” (MA thesis, Marmara Üniversitesi, Istanbul,
2006).
72
John J. Curry, “ ‘The Meeting of the Two Sultans’: Three Sufi Mystics Negotiate with the
Court of Murad III,” in Curry and Ohlander, Sufism and Society, 235–37.
73
Süleyman Özmucur and Şevket Pamuk, “Real Wages and Standards of Living in the Ot-
toman Empire, 1489–1914,” Journal of Economic History 62 (2002): 301.
74
ʿAbdülkerīm, Menāsik-i ḥac, Bosnjack Institut, MS 316, nonfoliated (but found on
fols. 2b–3a if counting from the beginning).
and beliefs; and both see true authority as emerging from books rather than
people themselves.75 These pilgrimage guides, like other cheap, pietistic
books, demonstrated the increasing confidence of even everyday Rūmī Mus-
lims when interacting with their Arab brethren, no longer afraid of asserting
their own mastery of the Islamic tradition.
Over the course of the sixteenth century, the hajj became an increasingly
viable devotional practice for Muslims from the Turkish-speaking lands of
the Ottoman Empire as a newly developed physical and textual infrastructure
connected the empire to the Two Sanctuaries via Damascus. Even if only a
minority of Muslims were able to successfully complete the hajj every year,
the pilgrimage came to be a progressively central aspect of Muslim religiosity
in the Ottoman Empire.
THE ROAD FROM DAMASCUS
One of the particularities of the Ottoman hajj was that pilgrims considered it
to be more than a set of rites limited to Mecca and Medina. It was, instead, an
entire journey that started in Damascus. Although taking a boat to Egypt would
have been the more direct option for many pilgrims, the vast majority chose to
go via the overland route. Fear of piracy was certainly one deterrent to board-
ing a boat, but there was also the stronger desire to partake in the many pil-
grimages to the tombs of prophets in the seventeenth century. Whereas the
pilgrimage guides from the sixteenth century, whether in Arabic or Turkish,
mostly explained the rites and rituals in Mecca to an audience that had become
Muslim relatively recently, the texts that started to appear in the mid-seventeenth
century focused on the journey itself, especially on the roads that led to and
from Damascus. As Ottoman Muslim religiosity became increasingly centered
on the hajj, the hajj itself expanded to become a grand journey in a holy land
between Damascus, Cairo, Mecca, and Medina.
The journey can be divided in two. First was the journey to the prescribed
meeting places (mīqāt), which, as stated before, were, during the early mod-
ern period, in Damascus, Cairo, and Jeddah (for pilgrims coming from the
south by boat). The second was the caravan journey to Mecca and Medina.
Once it departed from Damascus or Cairo, the caravan route traversed empty
desert dotted only with the continuously expanding forts and reservoirs. This
meant that shrines and holy sites were primarily visited either while waiting in
Damascus or Cairo, or after the hajj itself, when it was possible to take a dif-
ferent caravan back that would return to Cairo or wind its way through Gaza,
Palestine, and greater Syria. From Damascus, pilgrims could then take a
75
The same emphasis on reading as the main method of learning about the hajj is found in
later works aimed at “lazy” readers. See Ibrāhīm b. ʿAbdullah es-Sākizī, Menāzilü’l-ḥac,
Süleymaniye Kütüphanesi, MS Yahya Tevfik 145, fols. 14–71.
return journey through Aleppo where they could visit even more tombs.76
Another option was to come to Damascus and then trek through Syria and
Palestine to Egypt, where one could join the caravans departing from Cairo.77
The culmination of these various shrine visitations was the pilgrimage to the
grave of the Prophet Muhammad and the circumambulation of the Kaʿba.
The itineraries of these pilgrims are reflected in their notebooks and hajj
guides. The pilgrimage guide works written in Turkish from the seventeenth
and eighteenth centuries were often first-person travelogues that narrated the
entire journey from Istanbul, paying special attention to the tombs of Da-
mascus.78 One unknown traveler who set out on the hajj from Istanbul on
March 20, 1718, details not only the reservoirs and shelters along the hajj
route, for those pilgrims who had to worry about such minutiae, but also the
tombs of major figures along the way.79 His somewhat poetic description of
Damascus introduces readers to the early Islamic history of its monuments
and relics, pointing out the tombs of the prophets Yaḥyā (John the Baptist),
Khiḍr/Ḫ ıżır (the “green man,” teacher of Moses in the Qur’an and companion
of Alexander the Great in the Persian tradition), Hūd (a prophet of Arabia men-
tioned in the Qur’an), and those of foundational Islamic figures like Bilāl and
Muʿāwiya. The anonymous traveler’s description is to some degree a much
simpler rendering of the highly poetic descriptions found in Nābī Yūsuf ’s
(d. 1712) late seventeenth-century masterpiece, the wildly popular travelogue
Tuḥ fetü’l-Ḥ aremeyn (The sanctuaries’ gift), a copy of which nearly every Turkish-
speaking scribe, high official, and litterateur of the eighteenth century possessed.80
Tucked away at the end of pilgrimage narratives and guides like those of
Nābī and Sināneddin Yūsuf Efendi, we occasionally find the itineraries of
individual pilgrims.81 At times, readers and pilgrims copied and read these
76
Monjia al-Faz’i, “Darb al-ḥajj al-shāmī fi’l-qarnayn al-sabiʿ ʿāshir w’al-thāmin ʿashir,” Al-
Majalla al-tārīkhīya al-ʿarabīya li’l-dirāsāt al-ʿUthmānīya 35 (November 2007): 311–40.
77
This was the itinerary of many intellectual travelogue writers like Nābī and ʿAbd al-Ghanī
Nābulusī in the late seventeenth century.
78
Some examples include Abdurrahman Hibri, “Menâsik-i Mesâlik (pt. 1–3),” ed. Sevim
Ilgürel, Istanbul Üniversitesi Edebiyat Fakültesi Tarih Enstitüsü Dergisi, nos. 6, 30, 88 (1975–
77); Anonymous, Menāsiku’l-ḥac, John Rylands Library, MS Turkish 88; Abdullah b. Ṣāliḥ b.
Ismāʿīl el-Eyūbī, Hediyetu’l-ḥuccāc, Universiteitsbibliotheek Leiden, MS Or. 12380; Untitled,
Gazi Husrev-begova Biblioteka, MS 1541; Mehmed Edib, Behcetü’l-menāzil, Bibliotheque
nationale de France, MS supp. Turc 1276.
79
Millet Kütüphanesi, MS Ali Emiri Tarih 876, fols. 8a–9b. This short, twenty-three folio text
is attributed on the title page to Müstaḳīmzāde Süleyman Efendi (1719–88), with the title
Tuḥfetü’l-ḥuccāc (The pilgrims’ gift). However, this attribution is incorrect as it describes a jour-
ney undertaken before Müstaḳīmzāde was born. The true author is unknown, but a final quoted
poem by the poet Nābī suggests he was influenced by the poet’s travelogue, mentioned below.
80
For a modern transliteration of the text, see Menderes Coşkun, ed., Manzum ve mensur
Osmanlı hac seyahatnameleri ve Nâbî’nin Tuhfetü’l-Harameyn’i (Ankara: T. C. Kültür Bakanlığı
Yayınları, 2002).
81
See, e.g., Süleymaniye Kütüphanesi, MS Aşır Efendi 241, fols. 58–61 (this is the biblio-
phile Aşır Efendi’s personal copy of Nābī’s Tuḥfetü’l-Ḥ aremeyn; the back lists both the places
earlier travelers’ itineraries for their own reference or edification. One mid-
eighteenth-century reader copied the itinerary of a pilgrim from 1673 that
detailed the stops he undertook on the return journey from Mecca through
Damascus. The tombs he visited were many of the same as mentioned by the
aforementioned anonymous pilgrims but with a heavier emphasis on the early
Islamic period, like the graves of numerous male and female companions of
the Prophet Muhammad.82
In the case of pilgrimage to Jerusalem, the visitation of prophetic sites be-
came codified into a set of gestural and liturgical rites (menāsik) that paralleled
those of the hajj in Mecca. Two separate Rūmī pilgrims in the second half of
the seventeenth century copied down in their notebooks a variety of pilgrim-
age guides to Mecca but also copied down a “menāsik” for Jerusalem.83 Start-
ing at one of the city’s gates, the short text leads pilgrims through the city, in-
structing the reader to prostrate twice and read certain prayers before a set of
holy sites. Locations and relics range from the prayer niches (miḥrāb) of Sol-
omon and the Dome of the Rock, the site of the mīrāj (Muhammad’s mirac-
ulous ascent to heaven), to the pomegranate tree of David and various sites
(maḳāms) of different prophets and biblical figures like Jacob or Rebecca.
Somewhat like the Via Dolorosa, the guide has them literally follow the foot-
steps of the prophets: the footprint relics of Jesus, Idrīs, and Muhammad are
sites in the text. As can be deduced from the list of stops, this is an overwhelm-
ingly prophetic rendering of the city of Jerusalem. Sites associated with the
initial decades of Islam are few and far between: a very large Qur’an, presum-
ably one of the first copied by the Caliph ʿUthmān; the mosque of ʿUmar; the
shield of the hero Hamza; or the maḳām of Salmān-i Fārisī, the first Persian
convert to Islam. No saints are mentioned except as a generic whole, as when
pilgrims are instructed to contemplate the saints (evliyā Allah) or holy mystics
(erenler) before entering and departing the city.
The incorporation of these tombs of prophets and early Islamic figures sug-
gests the increased centralization of the empire’s religious life around the hajj.
The constant stream of caretakers and Qur’an reciters appointed to these major
tombs by the charitable foundations of the Two Sanctuaries was certainly a
sign of their growing importance, but the transformation went even further.84
Not only was the hajj more significant in the canon of devotional practices, but
he visited and the books he brought back to Istanbul from Mecca). Süleymaniye Kütüphanesi,
MS A Tekelioğlu 930, fols. 1–3; Gazi Husrev-begova Biblioteka, MS R3615 (folios in the back
of the nonfoliated manuscript).
82
Anonymous, Untitled, Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin, MS Or. Oct. 2940, fols. 83–88.
83
Anonymous, Ḳ udus-i şerīf menāsiki, Süleymaniye Kütüphanesi, MS Yazma Bağışlar
2411, fols. 39b–40b; Gazi Husrev-begova Biblioteka, MS 1456, fols. 41a–49a.
84
Some examples include Başbakanlık Arşivi, Istanbul, C.EV 130-6464–1168 B 29;
AE.SAMD.III 12–1130.
many other practices and holy sites began to migrate onto the hajj route itself.
For instance, holy trees were a common feature in much of greater Syria and
Anatolia; most villages had at their center a sacred tree that functioned as a site
of worship.85 Sometimes, however, the authorities attempted to ban tree wor-
ship as one early eighteenth-century legal response, scribbled onto a book
about the debate over pilgrimage to saints’ tombs, demonstrates: “Question:
Close to one village, there is a big tree on hallowed earth that the villagers re-
gard as a god. They come to it, beseeching it to grant their wishes. It is permis-
sible for the shari’a judge to cut down the tree, although it might cause much
discord? Answer: It is permissible.”86 Despite this, Rūmī pilgrims on the hajj
made it a ritual in the second half of the seventeenth and the first half of the
eighteenth centuries to circumambulate around a lone acacia tree that they
passed a few days south of Damascus.87 By the eighteenth century, the nightly
tales of pilgrims recalled the miracles of saints like Maḥmūd Hüdaī (1541–
1628), a major saint from late sixteenth-century Istanbul, while on the hajj
route itself.88 The increasing importance of the hajj in the seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries did not erase local devotional practices but transferred
them onto the hajj route itself.
THE CHRISTIANS’ HAJJ
The history of the hajj in Ottoman society is written as a purely Muslim story
by both Muslim authors of the time and modern scholars. Rarely, if ever,
does a Christian or Jew appear in their texts. Yet, by the late seventeenth cen-
tury, the hajj—that is, pilgrimage to an expanded Ottoman holy land—had
become a central devotional practice for many of the inhabitants of the em-
pire regardless of their religion. The Christian pilgrims’ destination was Je-
rusalem, not Mecca, and their numbers were likely to be in the thousands,
not tens or hundreds of thousands, but a reciprocity between their hajj and
that of the Muslims emerged nonetheless. Most famously, Christians and
Jews began to use the Muslim honorific for pilgrims, hajji, to designate those
who had completed the pilgrimage to Jerusalem.89 Weaving the threads of
85
See, e.g., Grehan, Twilight of the Saints, 134–40.
86
Marginalia in Katib Çelebi, Mizān al-ḥaḳḳ fi ikhtiyār al-aḥaḳk,̣ Süleymaniye Kütüphanesi,
MS Çelebi Abdullah 393, fol. 51b.
87
Jan Schmidt, “Ottoman Hajj Manuals and the John Rylands Library MS Turkish 88,” in
The Joys of Philology: Studies in Ottoman Literature, History, and Orientalism (1500–
1923), vol. 2, Orientalists, Travellers and Merchants in the Ottoman Empire, Political Rela-
tions between Europe and the Porte (Istanbul: Isis, 2002), 273.
88
Ibrāhīm Hanīf, Untitled, Bibliotheque nationale de France, MS supp. Turc 1296, fol. 25a.
89
Valentina Izmirlieva, “The Title Hajji and the Ottoman Vocabulary of Pilgrimage,” Mod-
ern Greek Studies Yearbook 28–29 (2012–13): 137–67, and “Christian Hajjis—the Other Or-
thodox Pilgrims to Jerusalem,” Slavic Review 73, no. 2 (Summer 2014): 322–46.
Muslim and Christian pilgrimage practice together, however, requires search-

ing for clues not only in texts but also in material culture.
The shared practices of the hajj emerged from the common pilgrimage in-
frastructure established by the Ottoman state, which aimed to guarantee the
safe passage of all travelers. Those traveling through Anatolia would most
likely use some of the same routes, caravans, and khans that Muslim pilgrims
used as they made their way to Damascus. The Coptic pilgrimage from Cairo
to Jerusalem employed the same set of intermediaries that Muslim hajj admin-
istrators used to pay off the Bedouin and to contact local governors to ensure
the safety of their pilgrims.90 Although the land route seems to have been pre-
ferred, and even demanded, those who chose to approach from the sea, like the
Greek and Armenian communities, had an agreement with the Ottoman gov-
ernment that any pilgrim who arrived at Jaffa by sea could receive a rental
horse and military escort to Jerusalem in exchange for a seven-guruş tax.91
At the same time, Christian communities built their own pilgrimage infra-
structure, which often mirrored that of the Muslims. In the first quarter of the
seventeenth century, Jerusalem’s Armenian patriarch, Grigor Paronter, turned
the Jerusalem pilgrimage into an officially organized excursion. He established
way stations along the main pilgrimage routes in the empire and from Safavid
Iran. Specially appointed “summoners” would be dispersed to Armenian com-
munities throughout the empire to arrange mass caravans to Jerusalem for an
Easter-time pilgrimage.92 The famous mid-seventeenth-century Armenian intel-
lectual, Eremia Çelebi (d. 1695), was one of the first to record, privately in his
diary, his experience on part of this newly renovated pilgrim trail. Exceptionally,
he broke from the traditional, and much safer, overland route with the Muslim
pilgrimage caravans (sürre) and hired a ship to take him and ninety other pil-
grims from Istanbul to Jaffa in 1649 despite the dangers posed by the Franks
at the time because of the Cretan wars (1645–69).93 Another patriarch, Martiros
Lremic’i, had built in 1681 in Üsküdar (the city across the Bosphorus from Istan-
bul proper where the hajj pilgrims gathered every year) a “Jerusalem House”
to aid Armenian pilgrims, the premises of which were significantly expanded
90
Febe Armanios, Coptic Christianity in Ottoman Egypt (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2011), 101–2.
91
This information comes from an Armenian patriarch who authored a pilgrimage guide.
Roberta R. Ervine, “Changes in Armenian Pilgrim Attitudes between 1600 and 1857: The Wit-
ness of Three Documents,” in The Armenians in Jerusalem and the Holy Land, ed. Michael E.
Stone, Roberta R. Ervine, and Nira Stone (Leuven: Peeters, 2002), 85. I would like to thank Sergio
de Porta for bringing Ervine’s article to my attention.
92
Ervine, “Changes in Armenian Pilgrim Attitudes,” 82–83; Simeon Dpir Lehats’i, The
Travel Accounts of Simēon of Poland, trans. George A. Bournoutian (Costa Mesa, CA: Mazda,
2007).
93
Many thanks to Polina Ivanova for translating the relevant sections of Eremia K’eomiwrchean,
Oragrut’iwn Eremia Ch’elepi K’eomiwrcheani: Yaweluats; t’ught’er, Ugherdzner, Gandzer Ew
Oghber, ed. Mesrop Nshanean (Jerusalem: Tparan Srbots’ Hakobeants’, 1939), 7–8.
over the course of the eighteenth century.94 Once they reached Jerusalem, the
pilgrims were taken under the wing of their respective church, but, until that
point, different Christian sects often shared travel facilities. The Coptic pilgrimage
caravan, for instance, stopped at the Armenian monastery in Ramla that housed
Armenian and Greek pilgrims coming from Jaffa.95
As the physical infrastructure of the Christian hajj between Jerusalem and
the centers of the empire was strengthened, its textual foundations were sim-
ilarly developed through pilgrimage guides. Bishop Hanna of Jerusalem
wrote during the first quarter of the eighteenth century a guide to convince
and direct Anatolian Armenians on the pilgrimage to Jerusalem.96 Besides
listing the holy places of Jerusalem, it provided the same type of instructions
to pilgrims—to write a will, say goodbye to loved ones, make sure not to
fight with other pilgrims, and so on—found in Muslim guides.97 Simple
Greek pilgrimage guides, illustrated by their scribes with schematic dia-
grams, began to be written and avidly copied in the second quarter of the
seventeenth century (fig. 2).98 The same pilgrimage literature was rendered
into a more comprehensible Arabic from ecclesiastical Greek for Arabic-
speaking Christians in the same period.99
Visual evidence provides another way to view the intersection of Muslim
and Christian pilgrimage practices. Starting in the mid-seventeenth century,
Christian pilgrimage destinations were often depicted on ceramic tiles, and
these images were taken from illustrated Christian pilgrimage manuals. Take
for example, a tile made of the holy site of the Oak of Mamre (fig. 3), a large
tree outside of Hebron associated in Muslim, Christian, and Jewish traditions
with various events in the life of Abraham, such as his meeting with angels
or his command to sacrifice his son.100 The tile was most likely produced
94
Ervine, “Changes in Armenian Pilgrim Attitudes,” 83 n. 6.
95
Armanios believes the monastery did not ordinarily host pilgrims, but it seems clear from
Ervine’s work that it did. Armanios, Coptic Christianity in Ottoman Egypt, 108.
96
Girkʻ patmue. Sby. ev metsi Kʻaghakʻis Ay. Eēmis. ev sbtsʻ. tnōrinknay tegheatsʻ Tn. meroy
Hi. Kʻi. ([K. Polis]: [I Tparani Hōhannisi ew Pōghosi], 1782).
97
Ervine, “Changes in Armenian Pilgrim Attitudes,” 84–85.
98
Sotirios N. Kadas, Hoi Hagioi Topoi: Eikonographemena Proskynetaria 17ou–18ou Ai
(Athens: Kapon, 1998).
99
See, for example, the text at Bibliotheque nationale de France, MS Arabe 312. Matar
claims that this treatise dates from the 1590s and is a defensive claim of Arabic Orthodox to
Greek speakers from Istanbul, but there is no evidence for this as the treatise seems to be from
the 1640s, given the other treatises copied by the scribe. Nabil I. Matar, “An Arabic Orthodox
Account of the Holy Land, c. 1590s,” in Through the Eyes of the Beholder: The Holy Land, 1517–
1713, ed. Judy A. Hayden and Nabil I. Matar, trans. Mohammad Asfour (Leiden: Brill, 2013),
27–51; Armanios, Coptic Christianity in Ottoman Egypt, 99.
100
On some of the traditions regarding the site, see F. Nigel Hepper and Shimon Gibson,
“Abraham’s Oak of Mamre: The Story of a Venerable Tree,” Palestine Exploration Quarterly
126, no. 2 (July 1994): 94–105. A Russian Orthodox monastery was founded on the site of the
oak in the twentieth century. The main tree appears to have died in the 1990s.
FIG. 2.—Pilgrimage guide (proskynetarion) of Hajji Ioanni, 1693, Bodleian Li-
brary, MS cod. canon. gr. 127, fol. 32a. Photograph by the author. Color version
FIG. 3.—An octagonal ceramic tile most likely produced in Iznik in the mid-
seventeenth century depicting the Oak of Mamre and the house of Abraham. Churches
and mosques seem to be depicted in the background, although the inscription at the
top is still unclear. The identification of the image is based on similar images in illus-
trated Greek pilgrim guides, according to the museum’s curator. Today, the site is regarded
as a holy site only for Russian Orthodox pilgrims. Benaki Museum of Islamic Art,
Athens (Inv. No. 87). Photograph courtesy of the Benaki Museum. Color version
around the mid-seventeenth century in the major ceramics center of Iznik, to-
day located a few hours’ drive from Istanbul by automobile.101 While it is dif-
ficult to know exactly how the tile was used, one can imagine it was distrib-
uted from Iznik to Christians throughout the empire, who would place it in the
walls of their houses and churches and commemorate the Oak of Mamre as a
101
The information regarding the tile is taken from the identification tag of the Benaki Museum.
holy site. Even those who were not fortunate enough to visit the site in person
could inscribe these images into their mental map of the holy land.
These Christian pilgrimage ceramics, however, mirrored the multipiece ce-
ramic tile images of the Kaʿba that were installed in public and private loca-
tions around the Ottoman Empire starting in the mid-seventeenth century.102
The Kaʿba tiles (fig. 4) are multipiece ceramic murals that depict, in a sche-
matic fashion, the Kaʿba and a number of adjacent shrines and holy sites. Often
there is a one- or two-line couplet of poetry commemorating the building. In
both Christian and Muslim ceramics, we see a shift in which small, private
paintings of holy sanctuaries drawn in books were painted on tiles and dis-
persed to communities around the empire to be displayed publicly. Moreover,
both the tiles depicting the Kaʿba and those depicting churches and holy sites
were made in Kütahya and Iznik, ceramic centers that turned to producing ce-
ramics for the general population in the seventeenth century once demand
from the Ottoman palace fell.103 In Kütahya, Armenian ceramicists in partic-
ular produced thousands of pictorial (and nonpictorial) tiles that went to dec-
orate palaces, mosques, and churches.104 Among those few craftsmen who
signed their names on the Kaʿba tiles, we see only Muslim names, but it is rea-
sonable to assume that Greek, Armenian, and Muslim ceramicists, living and
working next to each other in Iznik, would be familiar with one another’s
products or were willing to produce ceramics depicting holy sites from many
traditions.105 In Kütahya, the entire community of the city’s ceramics artisans
was Armenian, apparently, which suggests that Kaʿba tiles produced there
would have been made by Armenians themselves.106 In other words, through
102
Sabih Erken, “Türk Çiniciliğinde Kabe Tasvirleri,” Vakıflar Dergisi 9 (1971): 297; Kurt
Erdmann, “Ka’bah-Fliesen,” Ars Orientalis 3 (1959): 192–97; Charlotte Maury, “Depictions of
the Haramayn on Ottoman Tiles,” in The Hajj: Collected Essays, ed. Venetia Porter and Liana
Saif (London: British Museum, 2013), 143–59. On the development of images of Mecca and Me-
dina during the Ottoman period, see Sabiha Göloğlu, “Depicting the Holy: Representations of
Mecca, Medina, and Jerusalem in the Late Ottoman Empire” (PhD diss., Koç University, Istanbul,
2018).
103
Nurhan Atasoy and Julian Raby, Iznik: The Pottery of Ottoman Turkey (London:
Laurence King, 2008), 273–85.
104
The most famous of these are the thousands of pictorial tiles depicting biblical scenes that
were commissioned for a total renovation of the Church of the Holy Sepulcher in Jerusalem,
echoing the ceramic revetments that Suleyman had installed on the exterior of the Dome of
the Rock. Because of sectarian differences, the tiles were never installed on the intended church
and were instead placed in the Cathedral of St. James. John Carswell, Kütahya Tiles and Pottery
from the Armenian Cathedral of St. James, Jerusalem, Vol. 1: The Pictorial Tiles and Other
Vessels (Oxford: Clarendon, 1972).
105
Erken, “Türk Çiniciliğinde Kabe Tasvirleri,” 316.
106
Dickran Kouymjian, “The Role of Armenian Potters of Kutahia in the Ottoman Ceramic
Industry,” in Armenian Communities in Asia Minor, ed. Richard Hovannisian (Costa Mesa, CA:
Mazda, 2014), 114; Erken, “Türk Çiniciliğinde Kabe Tasvirleri,” 319.
FIG. 4.—Multipiece Kaʿba tile, most likely produced in Iznik in the mid-
seventeenth century. Benaki Museum of Islamic Art, Athens (Inv. No. 124). Photograph
courtesy of the Benaki Museum. Color version available as an online enhancement.
their mutual borrowings, these Muslim and Christian ceramicists equated the
pilgrimage to Jerusalem and the pilgrimage to Mecca and provided a shared
visual idiom through which to publicly inscribe an Ottoman holy land for
the empire’s subjects.
The emergence of Greek Orthodox icons of the city of Jerusalem provides
another parallel to the Kaʿba tiles. The icons begin to appear in the early to
mid-seventeenth century and initially depicted the city of Jerusalem and its
Christian holy sites, basing themselves on the images circulating in contempo-
rary Greek pilgrimage guides, yet also echoing the schematic diagrams of the
Kaʿba tiles.107 By the beginning of the eighteenth century, however, the areas
depicted on the icons had expanded to include holy sites from the surrounding
lands, reaching out to the Dead Sea, the Sea of Galilee, and Gaza.108 Similar
icons and depictions followed for the monasteries of Mt. Sinai. These map icons
might also have been produced for pilgrims to purchase under the orchestration
of the Jerusalem patriarch and then gifted to churches across the empire.109 At
other times, they were reproduced on the walls of major churches, as in the
Văcăreşti Monastery, the largest church in southeastern Europe at the time of
its construction by the first Phanariot ruler, and Ottoman vassal of Wallachia,
Nikolas Mavrokordatos, in 1716–22.110 The icons sacralized, in a literal fash-
ion, the lands between the Galilee and Mt. Sinai, turning the area itself into
an object of worship.
As reflected in the icons, the Christian holy land quickly expanded outside of
the boundaries of the city of Jerusalem and into the countryside. One guide
states, “The city is not the only place to be called holy, for the surrounding vil-
lages and nearby locations are also holy and are called in the Old Testament
the Land of Prophecy.”111 As with the Muslim pilgrimage, pilgrims taking
the land route stopped in numerous spots in Syria and Palestine as they neared
Jerusalem.112 In both the Muslim and Christian holy lands, emphasis was placed
on the (often overlapping) prophetic sites and formative figures or events in
early Islamic or Christian history, rather than the pantheon of saints that had
developed in the ensuing centuries. The sanctity of Jerusalem and its environs
that these texts fashioned was not necessarily novel, but read together with
107
Kadas, Hoi Hagioi Topoi; Izmirlieva, “Title Hajji,” 141.
108
Rehav Rubin, “Greek-Orthodox Maps of Jerusalem from the Seventeenth and Eighteenth
Centuries,” E-Perimetron 8, no. 3 (2013): 120–26.
109
Rubin, “Greek-Orthodox Maps of Jerusalem,” 124.
110
This church no longer exists; it was purposefully destroyed on the orders of President
Ceausescu on December 30, 1984. The map icon, one of the few remaining pieces of the com-
plex, is now housed in the Muzeul Naţional de Artă al României in Bucharest.
111
Bibliotheque nationale de France, MS Arabe 312, fols. 1b–2a.
112
Stefka Parveva, “Human Mobility and Transmission of Information in the Ottoman Em-
pire from the Seventeenth to the Early Nineteenth Century,” in The Influence of Human Mobility
in Muslim Societies, ed. Kuroki Hidemitsu (London: Kegan Paul, 2003), 101–15.
Muslim and other Christian texts, it pointed to a larger consecration of the land-
scape between Damascus, Mecca, and Cairo.
As the hajj began to incorporate an extended journey to shrines in a larger
Ottoman holy land, the pilgrimage practices of both Muslims and non-Muslims
not only mirrored one another but often intersected. These intersections were
most evident at shared prophetic shrines, but they are rarely explicitly acknowl-
edged, often only appearing in the margins of texts. For example, in 1677, a
large group of pilgrims returned to Jerusalem stripped naked, beaten, and in
tears. They had set out from Jerusalem for the nearby tomb of Moses (Maqām
Nabī Mūsā), which lay half a day’s journey toward Jericho, when Bedouins
waylaid them and robbed them of all their possessions, even killing a few of
the unfortunate travelers. This particular episode was written down in the colo-
phon of an Armenian Old Testament (one of the common places for recording
notable events). The entry’s scribe identified the murdered pilgrims as two Ar-
menians, a Copt, and two Muslims, part of a caravan of “Greek, Europeans, Ar-
menians and Muslims.”113 While the writer noted the incident down for its un-
characteristic violence, the modern reader’s eye is caught by the odd mix of
pilgrims headed toward the tomb of Moses. The shrine is generally considered
a particularly Muslim holy place—formally established by the Mamluk sultan
Baybars in the thirteenth century,114 pilgrims in the seventeenth century flocked
there to be graced by visions of angels.115 Yet, the colophon entry makes it clear
that Christian pilgrims also journeyed out to the grave, which apparently ap-
pears on some of the aforementioned icons produced by Orthodox Christians.116
During the seventeenth century, the devotional practice of all Christian
sects in the Ottoman Empire became increasingly centered on a hajj to an
Ottoman holy land. Pilgrimage to Jerusalem and its environs shifted from
the supererogatory and uncommon action of individual Christians to a larger
collective journey through a sacred landscape that was enjoined on all of the
113
The colophon of the manuscript, presumably from St. James Church in Jerusalem (J397),
is quoted and translated in Ervine, “Changes in Armenian Pilgrim Attitudes,” 81 n. 2.
114
Samuel Tamari, “Maqâm Nabî Mûsâ (Jericho),” Revue des Etudes Islamiques 49 (1981):
231–50; Joseph Sadan, “Le Tombeau de Moïse a Jéricho et a Damas: Une compétition entre
deux lieux saints principalement à l’époque ottomane,” Revue des Etudes Islamiques 49
(1981): 59–99.
115
See the mid-seventeenth century treatise, Ahmed Vecdi, Risāle fī beyān eşbāh ʿala ḳabr
Mūsa, Beyazıt Kütüphanesi, MS Veliyüddin Efendi 809, fols. 213–19. For a description of
some of the angel visitations, see ʿAbd al-Ghanī al-Nābulusī, Al-Ḥ aqīqa wa’l-majāz fī riḥlat
bilād al-Shām wa Miṣr wa’l-Ḥ ijāz, ed. Riyāḍ ʿAbdulḥamīd Murād (Damascus: Dar al-Maʻrifah,
1998), 1:287–90. Nābulusī copied and inserted the verses and impressions of an earlier traveler,
Kibrīt, in his rough draft.
116
Rubin, “Greek-Orthodox Maps of Jerusalem,” 122; Sadan, “Le Tombeau de Moïse,” 75;
Amnon Cohen, “Al-Nabi Musa—an Ottoman Festival (Mawsim) Resurrected?,” in Mamluks
and Ottomans: Studies in Honour of Michael Winter, ed. David J. Wasserstein and Ami Ayalon
(London: Routledge, 2006), 34–44.
faithful. As both Febe Armanios and Valentina Izmirlieva have noted, Chris-
tian pilgrimage practices were often directly modeled on those of the Mus-
lims.117 From the pomp of the Coptic pilgrimage caravan setting out from
Cairo, to the establishment of numerous way stations from Istanbul for their An-
atolian brethren, to the inscription of private images of sanctuaries on public
tiles and icons, Christians imitated, or, as in the case of the tiles, directly contrib-
uted to, this new Muslim religiosity. Ritually, materially, and textually, a Chris-
tian hajj was reproduced for the environs of Jerusalem. The most telling sign of
this change was the widespread adoption of the Muslim honorific for pilgrims,
hajji, by Christians of all stripes in the seventeenth century for those who had
completed the pilgrimage to Jerusalem.118 In short, the hajj, having expanded
to encompass much of the Levant, had become a central religious practice for
all the inhabitants of the Ottoman Empire.
CONTESTED PILGRIMAGES
As is often the case, any blurring of boundaries also leads to the establishment
of new limits and restrictions. In the case of the hajj, the clearest example
comes from eighteenth-century Cairo. In 1748, a minor riot erupted there as
Muslims witnessed the festivities—complete with dancers and musicians like
the Muslim hajj caravan—that accompanied the departure of the Coptic pil-
grims to Jerusalem.119 They accused the Copts of attempting to imitate Mus-
lims. For the modern scholar, this is a startling accusation because it demon-
strates that Cairene Muslims implicitly recognized Christian pilgrimage
practices as the hajj. The Muslims understood, and rejected, the idea that all
the empire’s inhabitants could participate in the hajj. They demanded that
the soldiers put an end to the Christians’ procession, ban them from traveling
by land, and seize their possessions. The Copts managed to save their posses-
sions, but the true punishment was being banned from completing their pil-
grimage overland, a telling detail. For the Christians, taking the pilgrimage
overland was part of being Ottoman and would have allowed not only for
the public display of their religiosity and wealth in the streets but also for
the visitation of shrines along the way to Jerusalem. Perhaps this is why they
celebrated the use of camels for the hajj instead of ships in 1709 after a twelve-
year hiatus.120
117
Armanios, Coptic Christianity in Ottoman Egypt; Izmirlieva, “Title Hajji” and “Christian
Hajjis.”
118 Interestingly, even Jews, in the Balkans at least, seem to have adopted this honorific upon
completion of pilgrimage. Izmirlieva, “Title Hajji,” 165 n. 59.

119 Aḥmad al-Damurdāshī, Al-Damurdashi’s Chronicle of Egypt, 1688–1755: Al-durra al-
muṣāna fī akhbār al-kināna, trans. Daniel Crecelius and ‘Abd al-Wahhab Bakr (Leiden: Brill,
1991), 368–69. The event is mentioned in Armanios, Coptic Christianity in Ottoman Egypt, 3–4.
120
Armanios, Coptic Christianity in Ottoman Egypt, 101.
Other shared rituals and symbols could also raise questions as to how one
community differed from another. The Muslim community of Jerusalem, for
instance, sent the Damascene scholar ʿAbd al-Ghanī al-Nābulusī (1641–1731)
a worried inquiry as to whether it was permissible for them to use candles
to illuminate the mosques on holidays or was this too much of a Christian
innovation?121 Did the prodigious use of candles turn the Dome of the Rock
into the Church of the Holy Sepulcher?122 Another example comes from a
fatwa (legal opinion) that was included in the late seventeenth-century canon-
ical imperial legal collections. A petitioner inquires about a village claiming
to house the birthplace of Jesus. “In one site in a village, the Christians claim
that Jesus, utmost peace and prayers upon him and our prophets, was born.
They built upon this site a church and erected in it statues and paintings,
but Jesus’s birth in that site is not confirmed by an authoritative and correct
source [riwāya saḥīḥa]. Is it acceptable for a Muslim to enter this church for
the purposes of pilgrimage [ziyāra] or not?”123 The chief jurist, lacking a ju-
risprudential precedent for this new case, demurred, replying only that it was
acceptable, but frowned upon (makrūh), for a Muslim to enter a church
or synagogue.124 The question, though, reveals the challenges that Muslims
confronted as they journeyed through this holy land. A constant temptation
lurked in these shared and overlapping sites, a temptation to be seduced by
or confronted with Christian practices that resembled Muslim ones to a large
degree. It was part of a deeper ambivalence during the seventeenth and eigh-
teenth centuries as to which daily practices, objects, and beliefs constituted Islam.
Yet whatever tensions existed between Muslims and non-Muslims on their
shared travels were often surpassed by intra-Muslim antagonism between Ar-
abs and Rūmīs. The vision of the holy land cultivated by Rūmī pilgrims in
general and the imperial government in particular could run aground on the
graves that local communities found sacred.125 Ibn Ḥ abīb, a minor provincial
scholar from Nablus in the mid-seventeenth century, was forced to publish a
(somewhat disingenuous) retraction after insisting on the sanctity of Nablus
121
ʿAbd al-Ghanī al-Nābulusī, Ajwabat al-as’ila waradat min Bayt al-Maqdis, Süleymaniye
Kütüphanesi, MS Çelebi Abdullah 385, fols. 73–87.
122
Al-Nābulusī, Al-Ḥ aqīqah wa’l-majāz, 1:382–83.
123
Çatalcalı Ali Efendi, Fetava-ı Ali Efendi, ed. Ṣālıḥ b. Aḥmed el-Kefevī, 4th ed. (Istanbul:
Tabhane-i Amire Matbaası, 1272h), 2:620.
124
Şeyhülislam Çatalcalı Ali Efendi (d. 1692) said that according to the Hidāya it was for-
bidden for judges to enter non-Muslim houses of worship in order to take oaths, but this was not
applicable to Muslims at large. The al-Fatāwa al-Tatarkhāniyya says that it is permissible but
inadvisable for Muslims to enter churches, only because they are gathering places of demons
rather than any particular ban on entering. However, the şeyhülislam notes that he himself had
previously ruled that it was not permissible to accompany Jews into a synagogue.
125
See, for example, the survey conducted by the governor of Jerusalem and Hebron to verify
the authenticity of shrines so as to identify which ones were worthy of restoration and continued
patronage. Ta’rīkh al-Quds wa’l-Khalīl, Bodleian Library, MS Clarke Or. 33.
and its saints in front of the amīr al-hajj, Süleymān Paşa.126 After conversations
with the Egyptian governor, ʿAli Paşa, and a visiting Rūmī scholar, the
Damascene Sāliḥ al-Ghazzī penned an inquiry as to the true boundaries of
the holy land and whether it included Syria.127 Yāsīn al-Faraḍī (d. 1683), a
Damascene preacher from the late seventeenth century who wrote a rather
damning screed to spur the “foreign (mutagharrib)” government to act against
oppressive taxation practices in Syria and Lebanon, also wrote a new guide
memorializing the saintly graves of Syria.128
These protests emerged from the seeming erasure of an earlier, pre-
Ottoman holy land in favor of a prophetic or biblical landscape. While the ex-
panded hajj itineraries of Rūmī pilgrims created shared sacred spaces at the
tombs of Biblical prophets and well-known companions of the Prophet Mu-
hammad, they overlooked the tombs of locally important saints or compan-
ions. For instance, Shaykh Arslān, whom one modern scholar dubbed the pa-
tron saint of Damascus, seems to have been largely ignored by the Rūmī
travelers. These pilgrims also overlooked other famous places like the Grotto
of Blood.129 The graves and stations that they revered were those of the proph-
ets like John the Baptist, Moses, Jonah, Abraham, and, to a lesser degree,
Ḫ ıżır. If saints or Sufi figures were mentioned, it was often major and founda-
tional figures like ʿAbd al-Qādir al-Jīlānī (d. 1166) or Ibn ʿArabī, whose tombs
were, not coincidently, patronized by the dynasty.
As in previous centuries, rejecting the grave of Ibn ʿArabī became a means of
challenging both the imperial government as well as the particular type of Rūmī
religiosity from Anatolia and the Balkans. The famous Damascene scholar of
the late seventeenth century, ʿAbd al-Ghanī al-Nābulusī, wrote a short work
on the true location of Ibn ʿArabī’s tomb. Nābulusī, however, rejects the Ottoman
126
Ibn Ḥ abīb, Durr al-niẓām fi maḥāsin al-Shām, Princeton University Library, MS Yahuda
1862.
127
Ṣ āliḥ b. Muḥammad b. ʿAbdullah el-Ghazzī, Al-Khabar al-tamm fi dhikr ḥudūd ‘arḍ al-
nuqaddasa wa Filist ̣īn, Süleymaniye Kütüphanesi, MS Esad Efendi 2212, fols. 6a–18b. There is
also another copy at the Arab Manuscript Institute, Cairo, MS Jiografiya wa Buldān 99.
128
On the screed, see Yāsīn al-Faraḍī, Nuṣrat al-mutagharribīn ʿan al-’awt ̣ān ʿala al-ẓulma
ve ahl al-ʿudwān [Beseeching help from the foreigners to this land against oppression and peo-
ple of enmity], Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin, MS Sprenger 907. On the pilgrimage guide, see
Nubdha lat ̣īfa fi’l-mazārāt al-sharīfa, Princeton University Library, MS Yahuda 2307. I ac-
cessed it through an eighteenth-century commentary by an eighteenth-century mufti from Erzu-
rum: Meḥmed Said b. Aḥmed b. Meḥmed Efendi, Sharḥ al-nubdhat al-saniyya fi’l-ziyārat al-
Shāmiyya, Bibliotheque nationale de France, MS Arabe 6007. On Yāsīn al-Faraḍī, see Martha
Mundy, “Islamic Law and the Order of State: The Legal Status of the Cultivator,” in Syria and
“Bilad al-Sham” under Ottoman Rule: Essays in Honour of Abdul-Karim Rafeq, ed. Peter
Sluglett and Stefan Weber (Leiden: Brill, 2010), 412–15.
129
Regarding the grotto, see Josef Meri, The Cult of Saints among Muslims and Jews in Me-
dieval Syria (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 209. The site is mentioned, however, in
the work of the aforementioned unknown pilgrim. Tuḥfetü’l-ḥuccāc, Millet Kütüphanesi, MS
Ali Emiri Tarih 876, fol. 9a.
tomb out of his deep love for Ibn ʿArabī, unlike some earlier, more critical
Arab scholars.130 In his pamphlet, Nābulusī argues that the tomb of Ibn ʿArabī is
not actually in the mosque built by Sultan Selim I. Rather, it is in the garden
(rawḍa) located in the street before the mosque.131 Those who approach the
tomb through the mosque and the miḥrāb (prayer niche) will never actually
see the grave; rather they will just see their own lowliness as they criticize
graves. Adding fuel to the fire, he states that those who were the “most prideful
in prayer” deny the Great Shaykh (Ibn ʿArabī) and use the mihrab and mosque as
an intermediary to God. In other words, they become polytheists by equating
God with the mosque. He commands the faithful to go out to the garden to ex-
perience God and to drink from the cool mountain stream. Those who do so are
the People of the Garden, those who do not are the polytheistic People of the
Mosque. For Nābulusī, the choice of gravesite stands for a larger choice be-
tween what he regards as true Islam and imperially mandated forms of piety.
Nābulusī also cultivated a large and active community of Rūmī readers
throughout the empire. His writings represent not only the perspective of a local
but also that of a writer who understood the hajj itself as an extended dialogue
over imperial and intercommunal relations. At the request of a number of friends
and correspondents in Istanbul, he composed al-Majālis al-Shāmiyya fi’l-
mawā‘iz ̣ al-Rūmiyya (The Damascene sessions: Sermons for Rūmīs).132 The
title of the book is an indirect rejoinder to a collection of wildly popular ser-
mons commonly known as Mecālis-i Rūmiye, or The Rūmī Sessions, by Rūmī
Aḥmed Aḳḥiṣārī. Rūmī Aḥmed’s work comprises one hundred sermons—
discussions ignited by his disgust at the saint-worshiping practices of those
around him.133 Nābulusī in turn arranges a year’s worth of sermons around
the progression of Rūmī pilgrims from the initial intention of undertaking the
hajj (which segued into a discussion of manumitting one’s slaves) to giving gifts
upon returning from the hajj in order to reconcile differences among Muslims.134
130
On the reevaluation of Ibn ʿArabī by seventeenth-century Arab scholars, see Khaled el-
Rouayheb, Islamic Intellectual History in the Seventeenth Century: Scholarly Currents in the
Ottoman Empire and the Maghreb (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 235–344.
131
ʿAbd al-Ghanī al-Nābulusī, Al-Sirr al-muḫtabī fi ḍarīḫ Ibn ʿArabī, Süleymaniye Library,
MS Esad Efendi 3606, fols. 128b–131a. A partial translation can be found in al-Nābulusī, “The
Hidden Secret concerning the Shrine of Ibn ʿArabī.”
132
ʿAbd al-Ghanī al-Nābulusī, Al-Majālis al-Shāmiyya fi’l-mawāʿiẓ al-Rūmiyya, ed. Hiba al-
Masalih (Damascus: Dar Nur al-Sabah, 2011).
133
Rūmī Aḥmed Aḳḥiṣārī, Majālis al-abrār wa masālik al-aḥyār (al-Majālis al-Rūmiyya),
Süleymaniye Kütüphanesi, MS Yazma Bağışlar 865. Although I dislike the term, these critics
of saint worship are often referred to as Kadizadelis. See Madeline Zilfi, “The Kadizadelis: Dis-
cordant Revivalism in Seventeenth-Century Istanbul,” Journal of Near Eastern Studies 45,
no. 4 (October 1986): 251–69; on Rūmī Aḥmed, see Mustapha Sheikh, Ottoman Puritanism
and Its Discontents: Ahmad al-Rumi al-Aqhisari and the Qadizadelis (Oxford: Oxford Univer-
sity Press, 2016).
134
Al-Nābulusī, Al-Majālis al-Shāmiyya, 152–55, 179–84.
Each of the topics addresses either one of Rūmī Aḥmed’s claims or one of the
many debates raging in the empire at the time. For example, in a discussion
about respecting filial bonds, which he connects to asking permission from
one’s parents before embarking on the hajj, he enters into the controversy over
whether Muhammad’s parents died as unbelievers.135 In other sermons, he in-
structs Rūmīs returning from the hajj to visit the graves of saints and holy men
and that the hajj required witnessing (ru’yā) the miracles of saints.136
Nābulusī ultimately chose to write a set of three travelogues in the 1690s,
each more ambitious than the last, to revive a different, and often older, pilgrim-
age. In the first, he set off for the graves of modern-day Lebanon; in the second,
he headed toward Jerusalem; in the third, he embarked on a year-long journey
through greater Syria, Palestine, Egypt, and the Hijaz that culminated in a for-
mal hajj.137 Nābulusī composed his itineraries to emphasize an earlier holy land
of saintly graves, using many of the pilgrimage guides, geographies, and histo-
ries of this land written in the twelfth to the fifteenth century. He also, however,
constantly adds new graves to this landscape, including those of recently de-
ceased scholars, even memorializing his saintly mother, whose death two
months beforehand facilitated his travels by lifting the plague epidemic prevent-
ing travel through Syria.138 Instead of rejecting the frequently visited graves of
prophets, he emphasizes the need to accept all popular folk traditions about the
graves, openly acknowledging that multiple graves of prophets like Yunūs (Jo-
nah) could exist in this holy land.139 Throughout his journey, however, he insists
and reminds the reader that he is, in fact, undertaking the hajj.140 As he repeat-
edly states in his second journey, the tomb visitations should be considered a
smaller hajj, and his departure for the larger hajj is guaranteed by the promises
and visions of the holy men he encounters outside of Jerusalem.141 Nābulusī for-
mally redefines the hajj in his travelogues as a set of encounters with graves in
this greater holy land.142
135
Al-Nābulusī, Al-Majālis al-Shāmiyya, 184–90. On this debate, see Kâtib Chelebi, The
Balance of Truth, trans. G. L. Lewis (London: Allen & Unwin, 1957), 65–74.
136
Al-Nābulusī, Al-Majālis al-Shāmiyya, 141–52.
137
A fourth was written later at the request of a local grandee. ʿAbd al-Ghanī al-Nābulusī, Al-
Tuḥfa al-Nāblusiyya fi’l-riḥla al-Ṭ arāblusiyya, ed. Heribert Busse (Beirut: Franz Steiner, 1971).
138 A majdhūb, or possessed holy man, comes miraculously from a nearby town to help with
the burial, having sensed that a righteous woman had died. Al-Nābulusī, Al-Ḥ aqīqah wa’l-
majāz, 1:66–67.
139
Al-Nābulusī, Al-Ḥ aqīqah wa’l-majāz, 1:299.
140
Al-Nābulusī, Al-Ḥ aqīqah wa’l-majāz, 1:202.
141
ʿAbd al-Ghanī al-Nābulusī, Al-Ḥ aḍra al-’unsiyya fi’l-riḥla al-Qudsiyya, ed. Akram Hasan
al-ʿUlbi (Beirut: al-Masadir, 1990), 20–21.
142
ʿAbd al-Ghanī al-Nābulusī, Al-Ibtihāj bi-menāsik al-hajj, Süleymaniye Kütüphanesi, MS
Çelebi Abdullah 385, fol. 319a. Nābulusī’s travelogue was imitated by many of his students,
such as Muṣt ̣afa al-Bakrī and Muṣt ̣afa As’ad al-Luqaymī.
CONCLUSION
The beginning of the end for the Ottoman holy land might be traced to the mid-
eighteenth century, when the system of transporting pilgrims started to fail,
sometimes disastrously. In 1757, a particularly gruesome Bedouin attack re-
sulted in the loss of the entire caravan and the demise of over 20,000 pil-
grims.143 Pilgrims continued to go on the hajj, both to Mecca and Medina
and to Jerusalem, but the overland route became increasingly marginal to
sea routes, and it was eventually replaced by steamships and jet planes.
Yet the holiness of Damascus remained in the minds of many. When the
writer Vâ-Nû (Ahmed Vâlâ Nureddin; 1901–67) traveled by automobile
through Damascus in 1930, he claimed that “No nation, not even the Arabs
themselves, talks about the holiness of Damascus. Only us Turks, for some rea-
son, seem to have gone off and attached the title ‘Holy [şerif ]’ to its name.”144
More than any medieval dynasty, Damascus’s sanctity was constructed by the
Ottomans, he believed. Vâ-Nû’s comments bring to the era of nation-states the
same competition for the Ottoman holy land that reigned centuries before.
Many others, like the Damascenes themselves, would, of course, disagree,
but one thing he said does ring true: only in Turkish is Damascus called
Şām-i Şerīf—that is, Damascus the Holy. Like the hajji prefix attached to some
Greek surnames today, it is a linguistic trace of an Ottoman holy land that con-
tinued for over three centuries.
University of California, San Diego
143
While the formal explanation for this attack is a breakdown in the system of payments,
Petersen notes that environmental changes drove new tribes to migrate to the area at the same
time that handheld guns that could be fired from horses were developed, allowing the Bedouins
to become increasingly dangerous by the mid-eighteenth century. Barbir, Ottoman Rule in Da-
mascus; Petersen, Medieval and Ottoman Hajj Route, 27.
144
Vâ-Nû, “Şamı Şerif,” Akşam, August 3, 1930. Many thanks to Sam Dolbee for bringing
this article to my attention.

Nir Shafir Holy Land

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Nir Shaﬁr IN AN OTTOMAN HOLY

LAND: THE HAJJ AND

early modern period. He argues that an “agrarian religion” centered on saint

(2019): 595–623; Derin Terzioğlu, “How to Conceptualize Ottoman Sunnitization: A Histori-

HOLY LANDS, OLD AND NEW

believed had prophesized the rise of the dynasty in a pseudepigraphic work,

Roman realms.31 This geographic and linguistic distinction was cemented

THE ROAD FROM DAMASCUS

THE CHRISTIANS’ HAJJ

Muslim and Christian pilgrimage practice together, however, requires search-

completion of pilgrimage. Izmirlieva, “Title Hajji,” 165 n. 59.

University of California, San Diego

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